Newsroom Stories

The popular Saturday Science seminar series celebrates its 20th year by tackling on paradoxes, those fascinating little conundrums that are sometimes just words colliding but other times are cracks in our understanding of the world that, when prised open, give access to a much deeper understanding. The first lecture is Saturday, April 6. ​

In the next decade, the Washington University Medical Center campus will be transformed by renovations and new construction as part of the Campus Renewal Project. Shown is a preliminary rendering of what the Medical Center’s north campus may look like.

From March 22-25, the Sam Fox School—in conjunction with The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington, D.C.— will present MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers, an international symposium investigating climate adaptation strategies in the Mississippi and Missouri basins.

Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study oxygen consumption rates of individual cells using photoacoustic microscopy, a novel imaging technology he developed that uses light and sound to measure change.

Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, has received a prestigious research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kelleher is the Hugo F. & Ina Champ Urbauer Career Development Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis. The two-year, $50,000 fellowship supports early-career scientists and scholars in science, mathematics, economics and computer science. Fellows may use the funds for equipment, technical assistance, professional travel or trainee support.

M.J. Warsi, PhD, a well-known linguist and researcher who teacheslinguistics and Indian languages at Washington University in St. Louis,received the Inspirational Leadership Award at an international conference of intellectuals held recently at India International Centre, New Delhi.

About 200 WUSTL students have committed to accomplishing far-reaching projects, and they will showcase their plans at the annual Faces of Hope event on Wednesday, March 27. The event is hosted by the Gephardt Institute for Public Service and this year is focused on student commitments as part of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University, which will hold its annual meeting on campus in April.​

Buried for 100,000 years at Xujiayao in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, the recovered skull pieces of an early human exhibit a now-rare congenital deformation that indicates inbreeding might well have been common among our ancestors, new research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis suggests.​

WUSTL students are gearing up for the annual Thurtene Carnival, and organizers plan some events this weekend to help bring neighbors together. The Thurtene Junior Honorary will host a neighborhood block party along with basketball clinics (shown, at right, in 2012) and a 3-on-3 tournament.

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.