Newsroom Stories

H. Holden Thorp, PhD, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, has appointed an eleven-member committee to identify candidates for the position of dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, announced last week that he will step down as dean at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2015.

A tax on sugar-sweetened beverages such as sodas, energy drinks, sweet teas and sports drinks could reduce obesity in adolescents, and exercise promotion such as after-school physical activity programs could impact younger children in the fight against fat. Those are the findings of a new national study co-authord by Ross Brownson, PhD, professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University has been named Best Workplace for Commuters (more than 100 employees category) by the Citizens for Modern Transit (CMT), a leading regional advocate for light rail and public transportation. Kim Cella, executive director of CMT, said the university’s varied menu of alternative transportation programs benefits both the Washington University community and the broader St. Louis region.

Sharon Stahl, PhD, vice chancellor for students at Washington University in St. Louis and longtime adviser and mentor to undergraduates in the College of Arts & Sciences, has announced that she will retire at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2015, according to Provost H. Holden Thorp.

On Sept. 17, Sherrilyn Ifill, the distinguished legal scholar and president/director-general of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. will visit campus to deliver an Assembly Series lecture, “From Brown to Ferguson: The Unfinished Business of Civil Rights” at noon in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom on the Danforth Campus. Due to an expected large turnout, remote viewing sites within Anheuser-Busch Hall will be available.

The Assembly Series offers a rare look inside one of the U.S.’s most secret organizations, courtesy of Jack Devine, retired acting director of CIA operations at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Sept.16, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. Devine’s presentation, “The Importance and Ethics of National Intelligence,” is the annual Elliot Stein Lecture in Ethics.

​​Leah Me​rrifield loves attending productions at the Rep, the New Jewish Theatre and the St. Louis Black Rep. She will share other St. Louis gems tonight at the St. Louis Up Close presentation in the Danforth University Center. 

A new study led by Michael J. Holtzman, MD, at the School of Medicine suggests that a fundamental antiviral defense mechanism is intact in asthma. This indicates that another aspect of the immune system must explain the difficulty people with asthma have when they encounter respiratory viruses.

Matthew W. Kreuter, PhD (right), was installed Sept. 2 by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton as the inaugural holder of the Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Family Professorship in Public Health. Kreuter is a professor of social work and of medicine, associate dean for public health and a faculty scholar in the Institute for Public Health.

Early in September, the X-Calibur mission, preparing for launch at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, N.M., put its pointing system through its paces to make sure all of its parts were working in programmed harmony.