Newsroom Stories

A team of researchers, led by Arye Nehorai, PhD, the Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor of Electrical Engineering and chair of the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has received a one-year grant from Washington University’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy & Sustainability (I-CARES) to take an interdisciplinary, “human-centered” approach to making buildings more energy efficient.

Missouri has been held out as a model for juvenile corrections programs, but the court system that puts young people into these programs is in crisis, finds a recent report by the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC). “Many young people in Missouri wind up having to defend themselves in our juvenile courts – and sometimes from behind bars,” says Mae C. Quinn, JD, professor of law and co-director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Washington University in St. Louis.

University College, the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed three new degree programs, including a master’s in statistics that is the only one offered in the St. Louis area. The other two new  programs are a bachelor’s in communications and a bachelor’s in journalism. University College will offer the new programs this fall semester, which begins Aug. 27.

Washington University in St. Louis chemist D. André d’Avignon, who manages the university’s high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance facility, has been named the winner of the 2013 Saint Louis Award. The Saint Louis Award, administered by the St. Louis section of the American Chemical Society, is given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of chemistry and demonstrated the potential to further the advancement of the chemical profession.

Alison K. Snyder-Warwick, MD, assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, was installed in June as secretary of the Sir Charles Bell Society at the International Facial Nerve Symposium in Boston.

Trevor A. Dawes, associate university librarian at WUSTL, recently was installed as president of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Bee populations are declining worldwide. But recently, students in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts worked with PAUSE, a multinational group of scientists, gardeners and beekeepers, to design pollinator-friendly sculpture in St. Louis’ Florissant Community Garden.

Spotify. Pandora. iTunes. YouTube. We are constantly bombarded with a seemingly limitless amount of new music in our daily lives. But why do we keep coming back to that one song or album we couldn’t get enough of in college? New research from Washington University’s Olin Business School shows that although consumers say they prefer to listen to unfamiliar music, their choices actually belie that preference.

Automatic federal budget cuts, known as the sequester, which began March 1, have had minimal impact on federal regulatory agencies, finds a new report on the U.S. budget for this fiscal year and next. The on-budget cost of regulation is detailed in a new report, Sequester’s Impact on Regulatory Agencies Modest: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2013 and 2014, published by Washington University in St. Louis and George Washington University.

Fumihiko Urano, MD, PhD, has been named the new Samuel E. Schechter Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Shown (from left) are Larry J. Shapiro, MD; Urano; and Victoria J. Fraser, MD.