Newsroom Stories

Several new faculty members have joined the Brown School and the School of Law this academic year. Read more to learn further details about the new additions.

As Germany prepares to enact quotas that will mandate quotas for female participation on major corporate boards, the United States is feeling the pressure to improve board diversity, says Hillary A. Sale, JD, corporate governance expert and professor of law at Washington University School of Law. After years of little growth, the percentage of women directors on U.S. Boards remains at 12 percent.

In Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, three undergraduate students—the inaugural Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellows—explore the hopes, illusions and realities of China in the Reform Era.

Described by The New York Times as “an artist’s artist,” painter Peter Saul (BFA ’56) has provided lush, lurid and scathingly satirical commentaries on political, social and historical events for more than 50 years. On April 11, Saul will be one of seven alumni recognized by the the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at its sixth annual Awards for Distinction dinner.

​The 18th annual Summer Writers Institute will be held on Washington University’s Danforth Campus this July, giving writers of varying experience levels the opportunity to join a diverse and energetic writing community. Evening sessions this year meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday instead of Monday through Friday. Also, the weekend sessions will be afternoons only instead of daylong seminars. The institute begins Friday, July 12, and runs through Friday, July 26.​

Brown School students representing the country of Kyrgyzstan perform a traditional national Kyrgyz Dance during the Brown School’s 19th annual International Festival April 12 in Brown Hall, Brown 100. The event featured 13 performances from 17 countries.

Scientists working at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered two tiny grains of silica (SiO2; the most common constituent of sand) in meteorites that fell to earth in Antarctica. Because of their isotopic composition these two grains are thought to be pure samples from a massive star that exploded before the birth of the solar system, perhaps the supernova whose explosion is thought to have triggered the collapse of a giant molecular cloud, giving birth to the Sun.

Pre-K through 6th-grade students and their teachers at Cool Valley Elementary School were the lucky recipients of more than 350 books donated by education students in Washington University’s Kappa Delta Pi honor society. As part of KDP’s service project this year, they raised funds to purchase the children’s books, which they delivered to the school on April 12.

Eleven Washington University research teams will share $2.7 million in new grants from the Children’s Discovery Institute, a research collaboration between St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.

Gautam Dantas, PhD, has won a prestigious National Institutes of Health Award for innovative research that may improve scientists’ ability to keep the digestive system healthy.