Newsroom Stories

Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, director of WUSTL’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), has become the inaugural holder of the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor.

In Modern Life, her third book of poems, Matthea Harvey offers a whirling, riffing, buoyantly ironic take on post-9/11 America. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, Harvey, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis, will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Workers pour sweat, blood and even dollars into the firms that employ them, especially in a labor market characterized by employment and retirement insecurity, says Marion Crain, JD, expert on labor and employment law and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Work can shape one’s life in ways that run to the core of identity,” she says. “Work law, however, ignores these realities of interdependence and mutual investment, committing itself to a model of employment as an arm’s length, impersonal cash-for-labor transaction.” Crain suggests looking at other legal models such as marriage law to more accurately respond to the realities of the employment relationship, particularly at termination. 

Need help in your department, lab or office? Student Financial Services can help locate and hire part-time student workers for the 2012-13 academic year. Departments hiring eligible federal work-study students pay only 55 percent of the student’s total earnings. Last year, work-study students helped the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences by painting sets, sewing costumes and more.

A team of engineers at the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University has received two grants totaling more than $1.3 million to develop innovative ways to cleanly burn coal for energy. The awards are part of a more than $5 billion investment strategy by the Obama Administration in clean coal technologies and research and development. ​

More than 2 million consumers got to gloat Friday about their shrewdness in procuring an iPhone 5, with its larger screen and 200 additional features through its new operating system. But once the novelty wears off, will they still enjoy their purchase? It depends on why they bought it, says new research from a marketing professor at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

For 100 years, the dogma has been that amino-acid sequences determine protein folding and that the folded structure determines the protein’s function. But as a Washington University in St. Louis engineer explains in the  Sept. 20 issue of Science, a large class of proteins doesn’t adhere to the structure-function paradigm. Called intrinsically disordered proteins, these proteins fail fold either in whole or in part and yet they are functional.

The Portfolio, a new electronic record of an undergraduate student’s involvement in student groups, leadership positions, community service, internships, awards, research, employment and many other activities, will launch with a four-week pilot project for about 80 students in October. The record is designed to complement the academic transcript.

New research suggests that a key immune cell may play a role in lung cancer susceptibility. Working in mice, Alexander Krupnick, MD, and colleagues found evidence that the genetic diversity in natural killer cells, which typically seek out and destroy tumor cells, contributes to whether or not the animals develop lung cancer.

What is the state of the humanities? How are they taught, what do they teach us, and how do they serve the public good? Earlier this month, cultural leaders from across the state gathered at the Missouri History Museum to discuss “The Importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences for Public Life.” Convened by WUSTL’s Gerald Early, the meeting was the third in a series of regional forums presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.