Newsroom Stories

Modeled on successful “city read” programs, The Big Read is a national program designed to encourage literary reading by helping communities come together to read and discuss a single book.

School of Medicine researchers have found that our gut microbes are biomarkers, mediators and potential therapeutic targets in the war against obesity.

There are currently two pneumonia vaccines available to the public — one for children, and one for adults. The bacteria responsible for pneumonia can be deadly, and the vaccines can prevent many infections. Streptococcus pneumoniae causes 500,000 cases of pneumonia and 40,000 deaths per year, making it the leading cause of infectious disease mortality among adults.

In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers (SBSSW) at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will host “Financial Freedom Seminar: Achieving Economic Independence Through Education,” Jan. 20 from 8:30 a.m.- 3 p.m. in Brown Hall. This free event is designed for members of the St. Louis community interested in building wealth, maintaining good credit, purchasing a home or starting a business. “SBSSW’s goal is to present the King Holiday, not as a tradition or a history lesson, but as a call to action- to fight for economic and social justice,” says Charletra Hurt, SBSSW co-chair and first-year student at the School of Social Work.

In three separate national ratings — faculty scholarly productivity, black student college graduation rates and the number of National Merit Scholars in the freshman class — Washington University ranks in the top 10. WUSTL ranks as the seventh most productive large research university as measured by the faculty’s scholarly productivity, as well as ranking in the top 10 in five broad areas and 19 specific disciplines, according to Academic Analytics’ Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSP Index), a new quantitative method for ranking doctoral programs at research universities.

Ray Bradbury’s vision of the future was a scary one indeed. Of course, that’s the point of being a science-fiction writer, but in his classic Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury wrote about firemen who didn’t necessarily put out fires. Rather, they started them in order to burn books and suppress learning and knowledge. The book is the centerpiece of a National Endowment for the Arts-supported program in February. “The Big Read,” hosted by the University in partnership with several local organizations, will feature lectures, readings, art exhibits, theater productions, book discussion groups and film festivals featuring the themes of Bradbury’s novel.

For the second year in a row, the Olin School of Business is offering a course that includes a succession of “celebrity” CEOs as guest speakers. The class, “Creating Exceptional Value: Performance Without Compromise,” is co-taught by Chuck Knight, chairman emeritus of Emerson, and Anjan Thakor, Ph.D., senior associate dean and the John E. Simon Professor of Finance.

Stardust, the NASA spacecraft mission, was given that name in hopes that the seven-year journey to capture comet samples would bring back to Earth, well, stardust. In an article in a special issue of the journal Science, Washington University researchers are the first to report that a sample they received from the mission actually does contain stardust — particles that are older than the sun.

In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will host a “Financial Freedom Semnar: Achieving Economic Independence Through Education,” from 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Jan. 20 in Brown Hall.

Joseph T. Strong, a research engineer in the Genome Sequencing Center at the School of Medicine, died Saturday, Dec. 23, 2006.