Newsroom Stories

The City of St. Louis estimates more than 10,000 vacant parcels have come into its ownership through tax foreclosure — and nearly 20 percent of all property within city limits is vacant. A new joint program between the City of St. Louis and the Washington University in St. Louis Office of Sustainability seeks to reframe the issue: turning vacant land into an opportunity that inspires innovative thinking and catalyzes tangible demonstration projects.

Advances in medicine allow doctors to keep patients alive longer, tackle fertility problems and extend the viability of premature babies. They also lead to a growing number of moral questions for both the medical provider and patient. “Across the country, so-called conscience legislation allows doctors and nurses to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, sterilizations, and end-of-life care,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “But legislators have totally overlooked the consciences of providers who have made the conscientious judgment to deliver care and of the patients who seek these treatments.” Sepper says that conscience in the medical setting needs to be protected more consistently. “The one-sided protection of refusal cannot stand,” she says. “Just as we wouldn’t say that giving students vouchers only for Christian schools furthers religious freedom, we can’t say that current conscience legislation successfully lives up to its goal of protecting conscience.

Conductor Steven Jarvi, praised as an “eloquent and decisive” conductor by The Wall Street Journal, will make his public debut with the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra Oct. 27. The Parent and Family Weekend concert, which takes place in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, will feature music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Adam Schoenberg and Edward Elgar.

Critical data for more than 2,300 federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cases now are available online thanks to a multi-year effort of researchers at Washington University School of Law’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL). The EEOC Litigation Project, which spans the period between 1997 and 2006, makes readily available detailed information about the EEOC’s enforcement litigation to legal scholars, social scientists, and policy-makers.

​Charles E. Canter, MD, has been named the first Lois B. Tuttle and Jeanne B. Hauck Chair in Pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton welcomed back two 2009 alums, Harrison Suarez (right) and Michael Haft — now both first lieutenants in the U.S. Marine Corps — who presented the university with a U.S. flag Oct. 20. The two men returned to personally thank Wrighton and the university for helping prepare them to serve their country.

Roch Guérin, PhD, has been named chair of the Computer Science & Engineering department effective July 1, 2013. Guérin is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Networks and professor of electrical and systems engineering and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been on the faculty since 1998.

James Siena is a New York-based artist whose complex, rule-based linear abstractions, or “visual algorithms,” result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly colored, freehand geometric patterns. This fall, Siena served as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Visiting Artist at Island Press, the nationally known print shop in WUSTL’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

The 2013 health open enrollment for the health/dental plans, the health-care and child-care flex spending plans, the Health Savings Account (HSA) and the Retirement Medical Savings Account (RMSA) will begin on Monday, Nov. 12 and run through Sunday, Dec. 2. This is the only time during the year that employees may enroll in the flex spending plans, HSA and RMSA and may change health plans and/or coverage without a qualifying family status change.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a key difference in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and those who are cognitively normal but still have the brain plaques that characterize this type of dementia.