Newsroom Stories

Robert E. Wiltenburg, PhD, who has served as dean of University College in Arts & Sciences for nearly 20 years, has announced that he will step down as dean at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2015, according to Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. After a sabbatical during the fall 2015 semester, Wiltenburg will return to teaching in spring 2016.

It’s one of the most recognizable buildings in St. Louis, a former department store once known for lush holiday displays. Today, the Railway Exchange sits empty, but architecture students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have spent much of the last semester exploring adaptive reuse alternatives for the 1.2 million-square-foot structure.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton presented the 2014 Faculty Achievement Awards to (from left) David A. Balota, PhD, Steven L. Teitelbaum, MD, and Samuel A. Wickline, MD, during a Dec. 6 ceremony in Knight Hall.

Staff members from Washington University Police Department, Bear Patrol and Parking & Transportation Services, in partnership with Hartmann’s Car Care & Towing, performed more than 100 auto safety checks in Millbrook Parking Garage Dec. 6 for students and staff in advance of winter break.

This year’s holiday gingerbread house was on display during a reception following the December degree candidate recognition ceremony Dec. 6. A replica of Anheuser-Busch Hall, the gingerbread house is now on display in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s atrium until Dec. 15.

Obesity and eating disorders expert Denise E. Wilfley, PhD, has been named the inaugural Scott Rudolph University Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, has shown early promise as a treatment for severe depression in patients whose symptoms don’t respond to standard therapies, according to a small pilot study led by (from left) psychiatrists Charles R. Conway, MD, and Charles F. Zorumski, MD, and anesthesiologist Peter Nagele, MD, at the School of Medicine.

Thomas and Jennifer Miller Hillman, philanthropists and Washington University alumni, are helping the Brown School create maximum social impact with a major gift to support its programs. In honor of the gift for the Brown School expansion, the new building on the Danforth Campus will be named Hillman Hall.

An astrophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis is among the team hunting for an elusive particle called a WIMP, that may be the fundamental particle of dark matter. To catch this notoriously wily particle they have built a detector consisting of a large vat of xenon in a deep chamber of a played-out gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

In the 1920s and ’30s, African-American preachers spread the word to a mass audience one phonograph record at a time. A new book by Lerone Martin, PhD, of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, chronicles a forgotten era when sermons by African-American clergy on vinyl (and wax) outsold popular performers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.