Newsroom Stories

Ralph Quatrano, immediate past dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, has been named dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

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. 

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.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit will hold a special session from 9-11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, in the School of Law’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall. The public is invited to hear three appeals cases related to a class action suit regarding organic food labeling; claims of false arrest, slander and malicious prosecution; and a dispute over a fee agreement between two law firms.

Making flu shots mandatory in 2008 dramatically increased the vaccination rate among St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare’s nearly 26,000 employees to more than 98 percent, according to a study led by the School of Medicine and now online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Don’t be fooled by a company’s recent attempt to market smokeless tobacco as “harmless,” says Douglas Luke, Ph.D., professor and director of the Center for Tobacco Policy Research at the Brown School. “Part of what we’re seeing here is the tobacco industry trying to position smokeless tobacco products so that they either do not come under the new Food and Drug Administration regulations or they come under weaker regulations,” Luke says.