Newsroom Stories

Andrew Katims has been selected to be the recipient of the 2013 Harrison D. Stalker Award given each year by the Department of Biology.  The award is given to the graduating senior in biology whose undergraduate career was marked by outstanding scientific scholarship as well as contributions to the university in areas of artistic expression and/or community service.

Think having an “Employee of the Month” program will motivate your workforce? Think carefully. Award programs may actually be less effective at motivating employees than academic literature suggests, finds new research from Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School and Harvard Business School.

​Two prominent environmental thinkers and activists will address climate change, biodiversity and pollution during a lecture at 7 p.m. April 10 in Whitaker Hall Auditorium at Washington University in St. Louis. The lecture titled “To Hell in a Handbasket?: The Global Environment and Sustainability” is free and open to the public. The primary sponsors are University College — the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences — and the International Affairs program in University College.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown they can coax cells to move toward a beam of light. The feat is a first step toward manipulating cells to control insulin secretion or heart rate using light.

More than 1,200 of the brightest and most innovative minds in the world gathered on the Washington University in St. Louis campus this past weekend for the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University. A complete story on the weekend will appear in tomorrow’s Record, but the WUSTL News Tumblr blog was updated throughout the weekend. Read about the weekend as it unfolded at wustlviewcgiu.tumblr.com/.

Day two of the Clinton Global Initiative University at Washington University in St. Louis began with an excellent and inspiring plenary session called “A Better Future for Girls and Women: Empowering the Next Generation,” moderated by Chelsea Clinton. The session featured four leaders who are making a difference for women around the world, including microcredit pioneer and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.

Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, moderated a panel discussion April 6 at the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U). The session was titled “Poverty and Promise in America’s Rust Belt” and was held in Umrath Hall on the Danforth Campus. Kailey Burger, third-year law student, served as a panelist.

The closing session of CGI U at Washington University has just concluded and the enthusiasm and passion in the room is still very much on my mind. We ended CGI U with a rousing, entertaining and deeply inspirational session featuring Comedy’s Central’s Stephen Colbert and CGI U’s namesake, President Bill Clinton.

Thomas J. Bernatowicz,  professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 105, Steinberg Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis. He will discuss what cosmic dust carried to Earth by meteorites has revealed about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae. The St. Louis community is cordially invited to the lecture, which is sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Yearly expeditions to explore the lava tubes on the famed archipelago will culminate in an international symposium to be held there next year. In the meantime we may all be able to participate as well, if only vicariously. WUSTL’s Aaron Addison, who has traveled to the Galàpagos repeatedly to map the tubes, apppears in a new IMAX film called Galàpagos 3D. Not yet released in the United States, it stars David Attenborough as well as the archipelago’s fantastic geology and biology.