Newsroom Stories

Washington University’s 161st Commencement ceremony, celebrating the approximately 3,800 undergraduate, graduate and professional students earning degrees, begins at 9 a.m. today in its new location on Francis Olympic Field. And for the first time, the ceremony will be followed by a Commencement festival. Mae Jemison, MD, the first woman of color to become a NASA astronaut and to travel into space, will deliver the Commencement address.

The Record has followed five first-year students who happened to sit near each other at a preseason game during Bear Beginnings orientation in August. Here, we check in with them as they wrap up the year.

Washington University in St. Louis has admitted 50 rising high school sophomores to its innovative College Prep Program, a multiyear initiative that prepares high-achieving students with limited financial resources for college.

People with neurofibromatosis type 1 develop tumors on nerves throughout their bodies. Washington University School of Medicine researchers have discovered a way to use the epilepsy drug lamotrigine to stop such tumor growth in mice.

The Women’s Society of Washington University announced the winners of the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarships during its annual membership meeting in April. 

Commencement student speakers Bryanna Brown, of Atlanta, and Noor Ghanam, who has lived in cities across the globe, took different journeys to Washington University in St. Louis, but on Friday, May 20, both will converge on the stage at Francis Olympic Field to address their fellow members of the Class of 2022.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have identified a previously unknown function for the fragile X protein, the loss of which is the leading inherited cause of intellectual disability. The researchers showed that the protein modulates how neurons in the brain’s memory center process information, a central part of learning and memory.

A new modeling framework proposed by physicist Mikhail Tikhonov in Arts & Sciences demonstrates how a more complex microbial ecosystem can be more coarse-grainable, making it potentially easier for scientists to understand, than one with only a few microbes interacting.

A forthcoming study conducted by researchers at Olin Business School and UCLA suggests the recent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion on abortion did not significantly influence how Americans intend to vote.

New research from the lab of psychologist Calvin Lai in Arts & Sciences shows that the racial demographics of a county, more than other factors, help predict discrepancies when it comes to who gets pulled over by police.