Newsroom Stories

For many firms, losing significant revenue and profit to employee theft has been a cost of doing business. But a new study from Washington University in St. Louis finds that information technology monitoring is strikingly effective in reducing theft and fraud, especially in the restaurant industry.

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in the continuing series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars held biweekly on the Danforth Campus beginning Monday, Sept. 9, and running through Dec. 2. All lectures take place at noon in Seigle Hall, Room 348. The series begins with a lecture by Derek Neal, PhD, professor in economics at the University of Chicago titled “Designing Accountability Systems and Incentives Schemes for Educators.”

Researchers have identified the mechanism by which a specific sirtuin protein called Sirt1 (shown in green) operates in the brain to bring about a significant delay in aging and an increase in longevity.

Rob Reich, PhD, associate professor of political science at Stanford University, has been named the 2013-14 Wells Fargo Advisors Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. An expert on political theory, he will make four visits to WUSTL over the course of the 2013-14 academic year.

Some 1,100 Washington University freshmen will paint murals, pull weeds and organize classrooms Saturday, Aug. 31, at 13 local schools for Service First, one of the university’s largest community service projects.

Mahendra R. Gupta, PhD, dean of Olin Business School and the Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professor of Accounting and Management, serves a burger to a student during the 19th annual Olin Cookout Aug. 27 at Simon Hall. The tasty tradition brings the Olin community together, with faculty and staff serving barbecued chicken, pork and hamburgers to hungry students.

Washington University Orthopedics is opening a walk-in clinic for joggers, cyclists, high school athletes and weekend warriors who are injured outside of business hours.

An odd feature of nerve cells may be linked to several forms of inherited intellectual disability, Azad Bonni, MD, PhD, (pictured) and other School of Medicine researchers have learned. Further research eventually may help in the development of drugs to treat intellectual disability.

The First Year Center offered free snacks and school supplies to freshmen on the first day of class. Volunteers also snapped photos to send home.

“I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences,” wrote Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker last spring. The candidate? “The American poet Carl Phillips.” On Thursday, Sept. 5, Phillips, professor of English and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences, will launch the Writing Program’s fall Reading Series.