Newsroom Stories

Winners of this year’s Olin Cup business competition got $75,000 to jump-start their ventures and create jobs. Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center at WUSTL, announced the winners Feb. 5 at the annual award ceremony in Graham Chapel.

Over the past 40 years, PHILADANCO has grown from a small community arts organization into a world-renowned troupe that mixes African-American cultural traditions with ballet, modern, jazz and other dance forms. This weekend, the trailblazing dance company will help the WUSTL community celebrate Black History Month with a pair of performances for the Edison Theatre OVATIONS Series Friday, Feb. 19, and Saturday, Feb. 20. 

Equipped with dialogue as pithy as their helmets, three female Victorian adventurers journey across time, space and history in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences comedy  “On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning),” opening Friday, Feb. 19, in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

The first head-to-head comparison of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies produced from plants versus the same antibodies produced from mammalian cells has shown that plant-produced antibodies can fight infection equally well. Scientists conducted the comparison as a test of the potential for treating disease in developing nations with the significantly less expensive plant-based production technique.

Maia F. “Dolly” Schultz, longtime university accountant, died Dec. 30, 2009. She was 78. Schultz worked in accounting at Washington University for more than 20 years.

WUSTL researchers have shed light on one of the most important events in earth history, the conquest of land by plants. No would-be colonizer could have survived without the ability to deal with dehydration, a major threat for organisms accustomed to soaking in water. Clues to how the first land plants managed to avoid drying out are provided by the drought-tolerant moss Physcomitrella patens.

Brian Evenson — whose intensely macabre yet darkly comic and subtly philosophical novels and stories led American Book Review to praise him as “essentially our poet laureate of violence” — will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, for The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.

Before watching other champions on television Super Bowl Sunday, come celebrate our champions at 3 p.m. at the WU Athletic Complex. The 2009 NCAA Division III women’s volleyball national championship team will be honored, along with the 2009 NCAA Division III national runner-up women’s soccer team.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a protein made by the malaria parasite that is essential to its ability to take over human red blood cells. “Without this protein … the infectious process stops,” says Dan Goldberg, M.D.

Experts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve and around the country will be on the Washington University campus Friday, Feb. 5, to discuss the Federal Reserve’s role during the recent recession and future directions for policy. The free public conference, “Monetary Policy Amid Economic Turbulence,” begins at 2:30 p.m. in the Bryan Cave Moot Court Room, Anheuser-Busch Hall.