Newsroom Stories

Kay Henry joins the Olin School of Business as the new associate dean and director of Executive M.B.A. programs. She comes with a wealth of experience in executive and business education. Henry recently returned from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she spent two years as assistant dean at Zayed University’s College of Business Sciences. She spent seven years at Rice University where she developed and then directed the M.B.A. for Executives program. Henry also spent several years in Boston where she taught management communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and ran executive programs at Harvard University’s Institute for International Development.

Courtesy photoMarshall KlimasewiskiMarshall Klimasewiski, writer-in-residence in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from The Cottagers, his debut novel, at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, for The Writing Program Reading Series.

The flow of copper in the brain has a previously unrecognized role in cell death, learning and memory, according to research at the School of Medicine. The researchers’ findings suggest that copper and its transporter, a protein called Atp7a, are vital to human thinking.

The 2007 Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition (SEIC) will kickoff its second year on Thursday, September 28 at 5:30 p.m. The celebration will take place on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in Uncas A. Whitaker Hall, and will feature a presentation by Timothy Hanser, vice-president of community outreach and director of Cardinals Care, the team’s community foundation. The SEIC is helping people in St. Louis cause social change. It provides funding and education for social entrepreneurs who develop solutions that solve social issues. Awards totaling more than $100,000 are available to winners under a variety of categories.

Photo by Noah Devereau, Post-DispatchSleeping fruit flies pictured through a microscopeMuch like humans, fruit flies sleep at night and take midday naps. They also respond to stimulants like we do, and their young sleep a lot more than adults. A new study, using fruit flies as test subjects, shows that sleep is important for learning and memory and that the need for sleep is tied to memory genes.

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Better memory performance (week of Sept. 6) • Predicting the spread of cancer (week of Sept. 13) • Curing diabetes in rats (week of Sept. 20) • Treating diabetes (week of Sept. 27)

At its annual meeting this summer in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Society for Economic Botany honored Memory Elvin-Lewis, Ph.D., adjunct professor of Microbiology and Ethnobotany at the School of Medicine; and Walter H. Lewis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences “in recognition of outstanding achievement, research, and service to the field of economic botany.”

Modern Humans may have been the divergent branch.Could it be that in the great evolutionary “family tree,” it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out? New research published in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it’s equally valid, perhaps more valid based on the fossil record, that the line should extend from the common ancestor to the Neandertals, and Modern Humans should be the branch off that. More…