Newsroom Stories

This year, members of the WUSTL community can lend a hand to the many St. Louisans who find themselves homeless – and freezing cold. The Community Service Office is again partnering with the St. Louis Winter Outreach team, and there are a number of ways WUSTL community members can get involved.

Michael Lane, MD, has been named patient safety officer for the Department of Medicine. The position is new for the department, and in the role, Lane will oversee and coordinate safety efforts to help improve health-care outcomes.

Bradley L. Schlaggar, MD, PhD, the A. Ernest and Jane G. Stein Professor of Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine, has been awarded the E. Mead Johnson Award for Pediatric Research. The award is among the most prestigious in pediatric research.​

Estrogen levels drop dramatically in menopause, a time when the risk of urinary tract infections increases significantly. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found new evidence in mice that the two phenomena are connected by more than just timing.

William H. Danforth​, WUSTL chancellor emeritus and chairman of the board of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, received the prestigious 2012 St. Louis Award​ for outstanding leadership and commitment to the region.​

Over the holiday weekend, the WUSTL-led cosmic ray experiment Super-TIGER set a record for the longest flight ever made by a heavy-liftscientific balloon. Now aloft for 45 days, shattering the previous record of 42 days, it has recorded more than 50 million “events,” or hits by cosmic rays arriving from space. The scientists are ecstatic to have such a great balloon because the longer the it stays up, the more data they will collect and the more they will learn about the mysterious mechanism that accelerates these particles and sends them streaming across space.

Karen K. Butler, assistant curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, discusses Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945. The exhibition, which opens Jan. 25, is the first to explore Braque’s work in the years leading up to, and through, World War II.

The widespread flu reports are a harsh reminder of the importance of influenza vaccines. This is particularly true for healthcare workers, says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “One-third of healthcare providers fail to protect themselves, their patients, and the public from influenza.” Sepper says that it is time for a national flu vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

As Barak Obama prepares for his second inaugural address on Jan. 21, he faces a nation still bitterly divided over his “legitimacy,” suggests Wayne Fields, PhD, an expert on the history of presidential rhetoric and speechmaking at Washington University in St. Louis. “Obama will offer his inaugural address to a nation in which a large and vocal percentage of the population are not just disappointed, but almost furious, that he’s been re-elected,” Fields says.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis long suspected that dueling findings about the impact of invasive species on biodiversity reflect the different sizes of study sites. Now field work confims that the impact of invasive species is different at small scales than at large ones. The scientists hope an understanding of this “scale dependence” will help settle arguments that have broken out in the scientific community and discourage recent popular science articles downplaying the damage invasives cause.