Newsroom Stories

Zombies at the convenience store. An apocalyptic beauty pageant. Tap-dancing bank robbers and self-aware television characters who turn out to be real. The worlds of Kelly Link are quirky, smart and frequently haunted. On Thursday, March 21, Link, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing, will read from her work for The Writing Program Reading Series in Arts & Sciences.

Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, will be among a distinguished list of speakers for the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) to be held at Washington University in St. Louis April 5-7. The announcement was made by President Bill Clinton and by Chelsea Clinton.

Spring Preview, the campus visit program especially designed for recently admitted high school seniors and their families, kicked off this week and runs through April. Student guides begin tours in Danforth Plaza in front of Brookings Hall. In addition to taking tours, prospective students can sit in on classes, talk with faculty, attend meetings and social activities with student groups, and sample the area’s entertainment and cultural attractions.

Noted behavioral economist Dan Ariely, visiting campus in March, took some time to sit down for a chat with friend and fellow researcher Michal Grinstein-Weiss of the Brown School’s Center for Social Development. What do great economic minds talk about when they get together? First, their groundbreaking Refund to Savings program — a joint project that encourages savings through Intuit Inc.’s TurboTax program.

Students from Washington University in St. Louis are gearing up for the annual Thurtene Carnival, and they’ll host community events this weekend — including a block party and youth basketball clinic — to bring the university’s neighbors together to join the fun.

Participants in the 23rd annual Pow Wow at Washington University in St. Louis line up for the grand entrance in the WU Field House March 16. The annual event, hosted by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at the Brown School, offered visitors and participants a full day of dancing, singing, drumming, arts, crafts and food. This year’s theme was “Honoring Our Cultures While Strengthening Our Communities.”

For his undergraduate thesis project, senior Thomas Muschninski working with professor of physics Jonathan Katz published an article in Nature Climate Change showing that the signature of an increase in storminess could be extracted from precipitation data for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The scientists suspect the same signature lies hidden under naturally stormier weather at other locations as well.

March 15 was Match Day for 120 soon-to-be physicians in this year’s Washington University School of Medicine graduating class. They and medical students across the country learned where they will do their residency training. Shown are students Ignacio Becerra-Licha and Somalee Banerjee after they learned where their residencies will take them.

Nine new faculty members have joined the WUSTL School of Engineering & Applied Science this academic year. That marks the largest number of newly recruited faculty ever to join the school. The new faculty members’ expertise ranges from biomedical to electrical, and energy to mechanical engineering. Read more to learn about their backgrounds and what they each of them brings to the Engineering School.

WUSTL has made strides in becoming more sustainable, from keeping more waste out of landfills to adding staff to focus on energy conservation. The university’s overall institutional waste diversion rate improved to about 40 percent in fiscal 2012. The campus community also is participating in the Recyclemania competition this month.