Newsroom Stories

On Dec. 17 at the Duane Reed Gallery in Clayton, the Arts as Healing Program is hosting a public showing of art created by cancer patients. This reception, from 5:30-8 p.m., will celebrate these patients as artists and also honor their “journey of hope.”

A celebration of the lives and legacy of Donald Finkel, poet-in-residence emeritus of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, who died Nov. 15, 2008, and his wife, poet and novelist Constance Urdang, who died in 1996, will be held at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 12 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge on the WUSTL campus.

A celebration of the lives and legacy of Donald Finkel, poet-in-residence emeritus of English in Arts & Sciences, who died Nov. 15, 2008, and his wife, poet and novelist Constance Urdang, who died in 1996, will be held at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 12 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge on the WUSTL campus.

You don’t have to look far these days to find examples of corporate scandals involving fraud. A new study finds that performance-based pay is to blame for fraudulent behavior and actually motivates people to “cook the books”. Judi McLean Parks, the Reuben C. and Anne Carpenter Taylor Professor of Organizational Behavior at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the study believes the results have implications for CEO compensation plans and the financial difficulties many companies are experiencing today. “All I have to do is look at Enron, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac to know that this does happen. And now we’ve demonstrated the causal link to contingent pay.” Fraud uncovered at Fannie Mae alone from 1998-2004 has been estimated to be in excess of $10.6 billion.

Faculty and staff can register to win one of 30 season PassPorts to The Black Rep. Winners will be chosen in a drawing in December.

Westbound Brookings Drive will be closed Dec. 8-Jan. 12 to accomodate sewer work for the new School of Engineering building.

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Should weather conditions create potentially hazardous travel conditions, Washington University in St. Louis will evaluate the situation and take into consideration the safety of the faculty, staff and students as well as the services that must be provided despite the inclement weather. In the unlikely event that WUSTL alters the normal work and/or class schedule, an announcement will be posted on the university’s home page (wustl.edu), and a number of media outlets also will air an announcement.

PikaardA team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant or animal. Since the machinery involved in nucleolar dominance is some of the same machinery that can go haywire in diseases such as cancer, Pikaard and his collaborators’ research may have important implications for applied medical research. Click here for a podcast from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Interview with Craig Pikaard.

Photo by Robert BostonJames T. Stueber ensures the Medical Center’s systems run smoothly