Newsroom Stories

Beginning April 14, applications will be accepted for volunteer positions for the 2008 vice presidential debate, to be held at Washington University on Oct. 2. All full- and part-time WUSTL students, postdoctoral appointees, faculty and staff who will be on campus for the fall 2008 semester are eligible to apply.

Merle Kling, Ph.D., former provost, executive vice chancellor, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis, died April 8 of esophageal cancer in St. Louis. He was 89.

Every so often we read a news report in which a young athlete collapses and dies during a competition — it’s rare, but it happens. And when it does, often the cause is a silent heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). The Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Clinic at the School of Medicine is devoted to diagnosis and treatment of HCM.

Washington University’s Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has been ranked 5th in the nation by ARCHITECT Magazine. The survey, published in the magazine’s November issue, examined all 117 programs recognized by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. Washington University was tied with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg. It was ranked first in the Midwest.

BarchThe Silvio Conte Center for Neuroscience Research at Washington University has a new director. Deanna Barch, associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, of psychiatry and of radiology, takes over leadership of the center from John Csernansky, the former Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry, who has become the chairman of psychiatry at Northwestern University.

A team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis that includes Alan R. Templeton and the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa has developed a technique to detect the ancestry of disease genes in hybrid, or mixed, human populations. The technique, called expected mutual information (EMI), determines how a set of DNA markers is likely to show the ancestral origin of locations on each chromosome.

David MarchantPAD students in Cecil Slaughter’s “Grid”A group of 18 students dancers from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences has taken top honors at the Central Region conference of the American College Dance Festival Association. The conference was held March 4 to 9 at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. The students were recognized for their performance of “Grid,” an original work choreographed by Cecil Slaughter, senior lecturer in dance.

Heart surgeons at the School of Medicine report that by adding a simple 10-20 second step to an operative procedure they achieved a significant improvement in the outcome for the surgical treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF). The surgeons redirected wayward electrical impulses that cause AF by creating precisely placed scars, or ablations, in the heart muscle.

North facadeNew York architect Nikole Renee Bouchard has won Washington University’s 2008 Steedman Fellowship in Architecture International Design Competition. Sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the biennial competition is open to young architects from around the world and carries a $30,000 first place award to support study and research abroad — the largest such award in the United States. The competition centered on the adaptive renuse of the former St. Louis Cold Storage Company, an abandoned 100,000-square-foot industrial building located along the Mississippi riverfront, just north of downtown St. Louis and Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch.

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo Services*The Lion and the Jewel*Men versus women, modern versus traditional, culture versus colonization. Such conflicts lie at the heart of The Lion and the Jewel, a sly and subversive comedy by Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka. In April, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present this deceptively light-hearted carnival of dance and song as its spring mainstage production.