Newsroom Stories

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.

Head football coach Larry Kindbom celebrated his 60th birthday in style as the Bears posted an 18-13 victory at Denison University Oct. 20 at Piper Stadium in Granville, Ohio. WUSTL picked up its second win of the year and improves its overall record to 2-5.

The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis commemorated World Food Day Oct. 16 by holding a lunch in Goldfarb Commons with a discussion following. Students were given “money” base on their random selection as being from rich, poor or moderate-income countries, and were given the opportunity to join with others to receive additional funds to pool cooperatively which they could then use to purchase food reflective of items available in those countries.

Elizabeth Roxas, a former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre — whom The New York Times once described as the “cool, still, lyrical center of the Ailey storm” — leads a master class with dance students in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences earlier this month.

Smoking is both a physical addiction to nicotine and a learned psychological behavior, so the best way to quit is to attack it from both sides, says Sarah Shelton of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. And help may be right at your fingertips in the form of your smartphone.

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.

Five new department chairs have been named in Arts & Sciences: Mark G. Alford, PhD, Department of Physics; Mark Rollins, PhD, Performing Arts Department; John Nachbar, PhD, Department of Economics; Hillel Kieval, PhD, Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Peter Schmelz, PhD, Department of Music; and Timothy Moore, PhD, Department of Classics.

​More students are enrolling in University College’s post-baccalaureate pre-med program because of the economy and a newfound desire to help people.