Newsroom Stories

Bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld will close the fall Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series with a talk on “St. Louis, Novels, and St. Louis Novels” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium. The lecture is sponsored by University Libraries and is also the annual Neureuther Library Lecture. It is free and open to the public.

Efforts at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals to safely coordinate a response to the Ebola virus have been underway for several months. Among those efforts are suggested steps for faculty, staff and students traveling to and from Ebola-stricken countries.

Acclaimed journalist and author Thomas Friedman will headline the annual Founders Day celebration at Washington University in St. Louis Saturday, Nov. 8, at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch. The annual banquet and ceremony that honors the 1853 founding of Washington University also confers the Distinguished Faculty Awards, Distinguished Alumni Awards and the Robert S. Brookings Awards.

They’ve shrunken Shakespeare, condensed Christmas, abbreviated the Bible and pruned and pared great works of poetry and prose. At 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14, at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, The Reduced Shakespeare Company will tackle the subject it was born to abridge: “The Complete History of Comedy.”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has boosted funding for the first large-scale clinical trial aimed at identifying drugs to stop or slow Alzheimer’s disease in people who are destined to get it. The trial is led by Randall Bateman, MD.

This August, a consortium of 65 scientists announced in the journal Science that they have so far found seven probable but not confirmed interstellar dust specks in a collector returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. Undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis found three of the seven specks of dust.

Improved communication among health-care providers during shift changes reduced injuries due to medical errors by 30 percent, according to a multicenter study. The research involved St. Louis Children’s Hospital and eight other academic medical centers. Pictured is study co-author F. Sessions Cole, MD, and attending physician Amanda Emke, MD.

The Association of College Unions International has awarded the Danforth University Center the Bernard Pitts Role of the College Union Award in recognition of its DUC Presents series and other outstanding programming.

John N. Constantino, MD, the Blanche F. Ittelson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, has received the 2014 Irving Phillips Award for Prevention from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Internationally distinguished architect and teacher Nasrine Seraji will visit the campus of Washington University in St. Louis Friday, Nov. 7, to open the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts symposium “Women in Architecture: 1974-2014.” The Assembly Series lecture will take place at 6:30 p.m. in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. A reception at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will begin at 5:30 p.m.