Newsroom Stories

Several of the School of Medicine’s musically talented students, faculty and staff recently performed their second annual winter concert in the lobby of the Center for Advanced Medicine. Shown are laboratory technician Rowan Karvas on clarinet and graduate student Mo Lee on piano in a performance of Paul Jeanjean’s “Arabesques.”

Coverage of the recent shipping crisis on the Mississippi River assumes that the appropriate response to a problem like low water levels is to find an engineering solution. Washington University in St. Louis hydrogeologist Robert E. Criss disagrees. He feels the river has been over-engineered and that many of the engineering “solutions” are not economic if all of their costs, including those to the taxpayer and to the environment, are taken into account.

Tolerance and civic discourse will be the focus of the Master of Liberal Arts Saturday Lecture Series that runs throughout February. Sponsored by University College, this free lecture series begins at 11 a.m. Feb. 2 in McDonnell Hall. George Pepe, PhD, professor of classics in Arts & Sciences, delivers the first talk.

Steven Cheng, MD, and Will Ross, MD, have received the 2012 Samuel R. Goldstein Leadership Awards in Medical Student Education.

As China prepares to transfer its leadership in March, the potential exists for a more progressive government. With asset-based policies increasing throughout Asia in response to rising inequality and aging populations, there’s never been a better time for discussion and information. This past November, the Center for Social Development (CSD) at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis co-hosted the conference “Lifelong Asset Building: Strategies and Innovations in Asia” at Peking University.

The air is crisp and cold but the voices will be rich and warm when Winter Opera St. Louis, the youngest of the area’s three professional companies, visits the Danforth University Center Jan. 29. The free performance will launch the spring Chamber Music Series.

Doctors may one day treat some forms of blindness by altering the genetic program of the light-sensing cells of the eye, according to School of Medicine scientists. Working in mice with a disease that causes gradual blindness, the researchers reprogrammed the cells in the eye that enable night vision.

Mario Castro, MD, and Angela Brown, MD, will lead a new office in the Department of Medicine that supports faculty members’ career development. The new program will feature workshops and seminars to promote faculty career development in the areas of research, clinical care, education and leadership.

Healthy men and women show little difference in their hearts, except for small electrocardiographic disparities. But new genetic differences found by Washington University in St. Louis researchers in hearts with disease could ultimately lead to personalized treatment of various heart ailments.

Julie Kennedy, a senior publications editor in the Office of Public Affairs, shares this first-person account of her experience traveling to Paris. Kennedy was one of six employees selected to study abroad in an initiative to boost diversity on campus.