Newsroom Stories

​​Daniel Giammar, PhD, has been named the Walter E. Browne Professor in Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He was installed Dec. 1.

Heidi Prather, DO, professor and chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation, has been named president of the North American Spine Society (NASS). She is the first woman elected to the position.

A committee of campus leaders is investigating the best ways to serve an anticipated increase in Pell Grant-eligible students at Washington University in St. Louis next fall and in future years. Harvey R. Fields Jr., PhD, assistant director for academic programs at Cornerstone, the Center for Advanced Learning, is leading the group.

You might want to stand up for this. Occupational sitting is associated with an increased likelihood of obesity, especially among black women, independent of occupational and leisure time physical activity, finds a new study from the School of Medicine and the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

A breast cancer vaccine developed at the School of Medicine is safe in patients with metastatic breast cancer, results of an early clinical trial indicate. Preliminary evidence from the small clinical trial, led by William Gillanders, MD, also suggests that the vaccine primed the patients’ immune systems to attack tumor cells and helped slow the cancer’s progression.

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation’s collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released Nov. 27 by the journal Science.

Science textbooks say we can’t see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are longer than the light waves in the visual spectrum. But an international team of researchers co-led by Frans Vinberg, PhD, (left) and Vladimir J. Kefalov, PhD, has found that under certain conditions, the retina can sense infrared light after all.

As part of the White House response to unrest in Ferguson, President Barack Obama has proposed $263 million for police body camers and training. While body cameras can be effective, they only work if the police don’t turn them off or delete their records, says a privacy expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the near future, physicians may treat some cancer patients with personalized vaccines that spur their immune systems to attack malignant tumors. New research led by scientists at the School of Medicine including senior author Robert Schreiber, PhD, has brought the approach one step closer to reality.

The St. Louis County Circuit Court has the authority to seek and appoint a special prosecutor to present the case involving Michael Brown’s death to a new grand jury — and should do so, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis said.