Newsroom Stories

Fiona Marshall, PhD, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, was one of seven faculty members to receive the Graduate Student Senate’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award during an April 9 ceremony in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

The annual Mr. Wash. U. event at Edison Theatre was held April 17. It supports City Faces, which provides art classes to children and young adults living in St. Louis public housing. The charity was founded by Bob Hansman, associate professor of architecture and urban design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

A new center at the School of Medicine will help scientists use the power of the immune system to fight infections and cancers. The Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs is part of BioMed21, Washington University’s initiative to accelerate basic science discoveries into improved diagnosis and treatment for patients.

Robert W. Gereau IV, PhD, has been named the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor of Anesthesiology at the School of Medicine. He studies the molecular mechanisms involved in pain sensation, and his research includes optogenetics, which uses light signals to activate or deactivate nerve cells responsible for transmitting pain signals to the brain.

A recent interdisciplinary conference that led to the publication of a special issue of PNAS on domestication raised more questions than it answered. Washington University in St. Louis scientists Fiona Marshall and Ken Olsen, who participated in the conference and contributed to the special issue, discuss some of the key questions that have been raised about this pivotal event in human history.

It’s the stage that launched juniors fashion. On Sunday, May 4, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will present its 85th Annual Fashion Design Show in the 560 Music Center. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza will feature dozens of models wearing scores of outfits by 26 aspiring designers.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton has announced the creation of new four-year fellowships in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, made possible by a generous gift from William H. Danforth. Danforth hopes the new fellowships will attract highly motivated students to this field of study and foster a culture of intellectual entrepreneurship focused on research and innovation in plant sciences.

Researchers at the School of Medicine are comparing the long-term benefits and risks of four widely used diabetes drugs given in combination with metformin, the most commonly prescribed medication for treating type 2 diabetes. The principal investigator at the St. Louis clinical site is Janet B. McGill, MD, who is pictured discussing options with study patient Michael Gingrich.

Did domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years? Genetic studies often indicate that domestication traits have a fairly simple genetic basis, which should facilitate their rapid evolution under selection. On the other hand, recent archeological studies of crop domestication have suggested a relatively slow spread and fixation of domestication traits. An article in “The Modern View of Domestication,” a special issue of PNAS, tries to resolve the discrepancy.

A review of recent research on the domestication of large herbivores for “The Modern View of Domestication,” a special feature of PNAS, suggests that neither intentional breeding nor genetic isolation were as significant as traditionally thought.