Newsroom Stories

Requiring hospital workers and patient families to wear protective gowns when they visit patients with a drug-resistant bacteria provides infection control benefits that significantly outweigh gown costs, according to a new study led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Areas of red and yellow show increased uptake of the altanserin tracer due to binding to the serotonin receptors.Most of us feel sad from time to time, even very sad, but during a bout of clinical depression, a person is unable to escape their low mood for several weeks at a time. A popular and effective treatment for depression involves a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Those drugs increase serotonin levels in the brain and help relieve symptoms of depression, and most scientists believe the brain chemical serotonin plays a key role in depression. Now neuroscience researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that in people who are depressed, a key brain structure has an abnormally low number of cellular serotonin receptors.

HamiltonMajor gifts from The Bellwether Foundation and from Nancy Morrill Smith will create the Robert Brookings Smith Distinguished Professorship in Entrepreneurship for Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business, it was announced by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. Barton H. Hamilton, Ph.D., professor of economics, management and entrepreneurship in the John M. Olin School of Business, will be appointed as the first holder in a ceremony planned for later this year.

Viktor Hamburger, Ph.D., a founding father in the field of developmental neurobiology, lectures to a zoology class in 1960. Hamburger joined the zoology department in 1935 and chaired it from 1941-1966 before gaining emeritus status in 1968. Hamburger (1900-2001) was one of at least 15 intellectuals who migrated from Europe to Washington University between the […]

There’s a telling slip of the tongue when Janet S. Rader, M.D., associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and of genetics, lists the things she enjoys about her job. “I love taking care of patients,” Rader says, “I love doing research, I love being a mom … ” Rader pauses for a split-second to reorient […]

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, faculty members were appointed with tenure or promoted with tenure.

In an age of globalization, local character turns up in surprising places. Take the suburbs. “It’s very easy to say that the world is being Americanized,” says Jacqueline Tatom, D.Des., assistant professor of architecture, whose comparative study of the peripheries of Lyons, France, and Boston was recently published in Suburban Form: An International Perspective. “Many […]

Photo courtesy Dept. of Transportation”Urban Sprawl and Transportation Policy” is the topic of a Weidenbaum Center “St. Louis Series” forum to be held from 8 a.m. until noon May 7 in Room 300, Arts & Sciences Laboratory Sciences Building at Washington University in St. Louis.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) bills itself as an organization of 184 countries working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty. While the IMF’s objectives are laudable, a study just published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution provides compelling evidence that IMF intervention actually has a substantial negative impact on at least one important indicator of a country’s long-term economic vigor – the level of foreign direct investment in that country by private investors.

WUSTL scientists say the present-day Missouri River is narrower and more prone to flooding because of extensive damming of the river.The oldest data available on the Missouri River – from the logs of Lewis and Clark – show that water flow on the river today is far more variable than it was 200 years ago. The data also show that the river is some 220 yards narrower at St. Charles, Mo., today at 500 yards across than in 1804 when it spread out some 720 yards.