Newsroom Stories

On their recent album You’re Everything, jazz vocalist Feyza Eren and drummer Steve Davis swing through a range of jazz and pop standards. On July 11, the pair will launch WUSTL’s Jazz in July series with a free concert in Holmes Lounge.

Marco Colonna, MD, has been named the Robert Rock Belliveau, MD, Professor of Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Shown (from left) are Colonna; Belliveau’s wife, Rita Deanin Abbey; and Belliveau.

Three School of Medicine employees have been honored with the dean’s annual distinguished service, research support staff and operations staff awards. Shown is the dean, Larry J. Shapiro, MD, with Kristin Palmquist, winner of the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award.

New research provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses yet of the genetic diversity of endangered great apes living in the wild, revealing new clues to the evolution of apes and humans.

​Every year, the late James E. “Jim” McLeod, vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, delivered a talk called “Habits of Achievement” to incoming Ervin Scholars in his role as director of the Ervin Scholars Program. This fondly remembered speech has been published for the first time in a book titled Habits of Achievement: Lessons for a Life Well-Lived, which weaves Ervin alumni recollections of McLeod with his speech. It also includes a short biography of McLeod’s life.​

William G. Powderly, MD, the J. William Campbell Professor of Medicine and co-director, Division of Infectious Diseases at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been named director of the Institute for Public Health (IPH), according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. Powderly succeeds founding director Edward J. Lawlor, PhD, dean of the Brown School and the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor; Graham Colditz, MD, DPhil, the Niess-Gain Professor of Surgery and professor of medicine in the School of Medicine, will continue to serve as deputy director. The appointment is effective July 1.

Brent Williams, PhD, of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a nearly $300,000 Early Career grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to bring his expertise in measuring particles in the atmosphere to a national study of the climate trend in the southeastern United States as well as the St. Louis area.

A key brain structure that regulates emotions works differently in preschoolers with depression compared with their healthy peers, according to new research at the School of Medicine. Brain scans of preschoolers with depression revealed elevated activity in the amygdala, the area shown in the red circle, when compared with scans of young children exhibiting no signs of depression.

WUSTL biologist Alan Templeton and colleagues in Israel and Germany received $2 million to look at the shifting patterns of gene expression, called the transcriptome, in two remarkably versatile species of fire salamander, one native to Israel and the other to Germany. The work may explain why this genus of salamanders is able to adapt to a wide variety of habitats when most salamander species live in one.

Thomas W. Ferkol, MD, the Alexis Hartmann, MD, Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, has been installed as president-elect of the American Thoracic Society (ATS).