Newsroom Stories

Most WUSTL campuses had a rare snow day Monday after the St. Louis region got blasted with major snowfall during the weekend, followed by bitterly cold temperatures. The School of Medicine remained open, and certain other “essential” services, such as police and facilities management, were operating. Crews were still hard at work Tuesday to clear the snow from walkways and elsewhere around campus.

Washington University boasts one of the nation’s most successful TRIO Programs, a federal initiative to support low-income and first-generation students. The program has helped Arts & Sciences senior Greg Opara, the son of Nigerian immigrants, buy books, travel home for breaks and, most recently, fly to interviews at top medical schools.

Experts and key strategists on charter schools in Missouri were in Brown Hall Dec. 11 for another event in the Brown School Policy Forum’s Child Well-being series, an ongoing public discussion on child welfare in Missouri. “Charter Schools in Missouri: The Emergence of Reform” examined state charter school policy both past and present and how the development of charter schools affect school choice and education reform strategies.

Your nose is not the only organ in your body that can sense cigarette smoke wafting through the air. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that your lungs have odor receptors as well. The odor receptors in your lungs are in the membranes of flask-shaped neuroendocrine cells that dump neurotransmitters and neuropeptides when the receptors are stimulated, perhaps triggering you to cough to rid your body of the offending substance.

Although most smokers realize the habit isn’t good for their hearts and lungs, Washington University orthopaedic surgeon Jeffrey Johnson and other surgeons remind patients that if they need surgery, smoking increases infection rates, makes problems with wound healing more likely and also interferes with bone healing.

Researchers at the School of Medicine and the University of Southern California have found that rates of smoking, drinking and drug use are significantly higher among those who have psychotic disorders than in the general population.

Andrew S. Yoo, PhD, a researcher at the School of Medicine, has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to independent researchers early in their careers.

Elaine Mardis, co-director of The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is featured in Discover magazine’s “100 Top Stories of 2013,” for her pioneering work in cancer genomics.

In response to the recently announced boycott of Israeli academic institutions by several organizations here in the United States, I wanted to assure you that as a university we strongly oppose this activity.

Working in mice, School of Medicine researchers report developing a gene delivery method long sought in the field of gene therapy: a deactivated virus carrying a gene of interest that can be injected into the bloodstream and make its way to the right cells. In this proof-of-concept study, they targeted tumor blood vessels in mice without affecting healthy tissues.