Newsroom Stories

Images captured in and around the Washington University campuses.

The Pew Charitable Trusts have named two early-career faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis among their Pew scholars in the biomedical sciences. They are Qin Liu, PhD, of the School of Medicine, and Gary J. Patti, PhD, of Arts & Sciences.

Freshman year of college can be a time of excitement and discovery, but it also is a period of ambivalence, sadness and doubt — and not just for students. Parents also struggle as their child transitions to college. Karen Levin Coburn, senior consultant in residence at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the acclaimed book, “Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding the College Years,” offers 12 tips – six for now, six for later – that every parent of a new college student should know.

A study published July 20 in JAMA Pediatrics provides even more compelling evidence that growing up in poverty has detrimental effects on a child’s brain. Dealing with this must become “our top public health priority,” writes the School of Medicine’s Joan Luby, MD, in an accompanying editorial.

Randall J. Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the School of Medicine, has received a MetLife Foundation Award for Medical Research.  Bateman, a leader in Alzheimer’s disease research, is the university’s fifth researcher to receive the prize.

A team of researchers, including neuroscientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has developed a wireless device the width of a human hair that can be implanted in the brain and activated by remote control to deliver drugs to brain cells. The technology, demonstrated for the first time in mice, one day may be used to treat pain, depression, epilepsy and other neurological disorders in people by targeting therapies to specific brain circuits.

Studying mice, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified two signaling molecules that are required for the proper development of a part of the inner ear called the cochlea. The study contributes to the understanding of inner ear development, a first step toward the goal of being able to recover lost hearing.

​During a recent trip to China, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton had a productive visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University. In addition to delivering an address at the university’s commencement, the chancellor signed a letter of partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong, outlining future collaborations and support between the two universities.

Scientists attending a workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory  slipped the leash of scientific caution and tried to imagine what they would do if they could redesign plants at will. The ideas they dreamed up may make the difference between full bellies and empty ones in the near future when population may outrun the ability of traditional plant breeding to increase yields.

Larry Taber, PhD, the Dennis and Barbara Kessler Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and four co-authors received the 2015 Richard Skalak Award for the best paper published in 2014 in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.