Newsroom Stories

An international team led by Gary Weil, MD, of the School of Medicine is poised to help eliminate two disabling tropical diseases as public health problems. A large grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund clinical trials and other studies aimed at preventing new cases of elephantiasis and river blindness.

A Washington University in St. Louis finance and regulations scientist has published a paper with a theoretical model that basically proposes bridging the divide between bankers and politicians to link such capital requirements to something of a political football: credit allocation — a bank’s business of financing loans.

Philanthropists Andrew and Barbara Taylor and the Crawford Taylor Foundation have committed $10 million to the School of Medicine to continue research to investigate the scientific underpinnings of psychiatric illnesses, with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment.

Los Angeles sculptor Elana Mann and Chicago public artist Erik L. Peterson have won the 2019 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards, presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Each winner will receive $25,000 to advance their studio practice.

The Performing Arts Department presents the world premiere of “Florida,” a new play by recent alumnus Lucas Marschke, April 11-14 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre. Workshopped last fall as part of the A. E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival, the play recounts a dysfunctional vacation for the ages.

A new paper, authored by Washington University in St. Louis faculty and alumni from Olin Business School, reports findings from five different studies of subjects in a negotiation agreement. The takeaway: inorganic anger generally leaves parties of both parts feeling guilty, distrusted and needing to make amends afterward.

Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have figured out how to feed electricity to microbes to grow truly green, biodegradable plastic, as reported in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.

Beginning in the fall of 2019, Washington University in St. Louis will welcome its first cohort of students who will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering. Unlike traditional environmental engineering programs with strong ties to civil engineering, this new degree will have a chemical engineering flavor.

New research from Arts & Sciences suggests that many “redundant” enzymes are actually specialists that ensure maximal growth across different environments. They also seem to increase resistance to antibiotics in conditions like those in the GI tract or urinary tract — raising concerns that current antibiotic susceptibility tests are inadequate.

Centene Corp. and the School of Medicine announced a partnership April 8 to transform and accelerate research into treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes and obesity. As part of the partnership, Centene will fund up to $100 million over 10 years in research at the university.