Newsroom Stories

The Washington University Board of Trustees met Friday, Oct. 5, and issued a tribute to Trustee J. Stephen Fossett, for whom a search continues following the disappearance of his plane over Nevada. They also heard a number of reports, among them one from Raymond E. Arvidson, Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences. Arvidson reviewed the research of his department in a talk titled “Geology, Habitability, and Life on Mars.”

Husband-and-wife performers Sanjay Shantaram and Shama Sanjay will teach an introductory master class in the Bharata Natyam style of dance at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 14, in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio in the Mallinckrodt Student Center.

Theorist Eric Santner, visiting Hurst professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will speak on “The People’s Two Bodies: Modernity and the Endgames of Sovereignty” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11.

Go to BearSports The No. 8 volleyball team swept four matches at the Augustana Invitational Oct. 5-6 in Rock Island, Ill., winning the tournament title. The Bears finished 3-0 in tournament pool play, defeating Grinnell College and Knox College Oct. 5 and Elmhurst College Oct. 6. The team’s undefeated record led to a berth in […]

As the frightful holiday of Halloween approaches, a physician and ethicist at Washington University School of Medicine would have us asking questions first posed by the teenage author of a timeless scary story: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. This riveting tale is often portrayed as a horror story of gruesome thrills. However, Ira Kodner, director of Washington University’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, thinks Shelley’s seminal novel foreshadows many of the ethical, medical and social challenges our society confronts today.

MackinnonSusan Mackinnon has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors medical scientists in the United States can receive. Mackinnon was honored for her professional achievement in the health sciences.

Studying efforts to combat obesity in children, a research team led by investigators at the School of Medicine has found that children who lose weight are able to keep it off more effectively if they participate in a maintenance-targeted treatment program, although the effectiveness of the maintenance program lessens over time. The researchers report their findings in the Oct. 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

William F. Stenson, M.D., has been named the Dr. Nicholas V. Costrini Professor of Gastroenterology & Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the School of Medicine. Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton made the announcement with Larry J. Shapiro, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is bringing together a distinguished group of scientists, legal scholars, jurists and philosophers from across the country to help integrate new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system. The Law and Neuroscience Project is the first systematic effort to bridge the fields of law and science in considering how courts should deal with new brain-scanning techniques as they apply to matters of law.

An extra degree of precision will be added to radiation treatments for prostate cancer at the School of Medicine following the installation of two new technologies in the Department of Radiation Oncology. The move to adopt these technologies was led by Jeff Michalski, professor of radiation oncology.