Newsroom Stories

Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist. Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning. Annabel is desperate to pursue the indulgences of ordinary American life. Misfit and motherless, these three teenage girls traverse a surreal desert landscape of eccentric characters, air-conditioning and darkly illuminating signs and portents. Welcome to The Quick and the Dead, the fourth novel by acclaimed fiction writer Joy Williams, who will read from her work March 21 for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Experts on youth advocacy and school desegregation will come together March 22 and 23 for a series of events as part of the Youth Justice Program at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Bryan Cave Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 310.

A student tour guide begins a tour of the Danforth Campus for prospective students and their families in front of Brookings Hall. Tours will be a common sight on campus this April as WUSTL hosts Spring Preview for prospective students for the Class of 2016. During the monthlong celebration, high school seniors who have been admitted to WUSTL can experience tours of campus, sit in on classes and more.

“The truth is puddles of predictability. This is going to have music and dancing and people dying, and it’s going to be amazing.” So observes Lilly, a 14-year-old novelist whose latest story may or may not be based on her own recently deceased mother. But the line could well serve as a statement-of-purpose for Camden & Lilly, the new play by Carter Lewis, which will receive its world premiere later this month at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The goal of Agrawal’s project, titled “Provably Good Concurrency Platforms for Streaming Applications,” is to design platforms that will allow programmers to easily write correct and efficient high-throughput parallel programs.

Jeff Cannon (right), associate dean and director of undergraduate programs at Olin Business School, chats with Kathleen Robbins of Indiana University March 9 following the corporate panel of the National Undergraduate Business Symposium at the Knight Center.

Mathematician John E. McCarthy, PhD, was installed March 2 as the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts & Sciences in a ceremony in Holmes Lounge.  Following the formal installation and the presentation of the professorship medallion, McCarthy spoke on “Why Pure Mathematics Matters.”

William F. Pickard of Washington Unviersity in St. Louis introduces the February 2012 special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE by quoting the Bible: “The wind bloweth where it listeth.” That, in so many words, describes is the major technological problem with renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. The special issue, which Pickard co-edited with Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide, discusses several solutions to intermittency, as it is called, first among them massive energy storage.

Batten disease is a rare but fatal neurological disorder that typically strikes young children. Working in mice with the infantile form of the disease, scientists have discovered dramatic improvements in life span and motor function by treating the animals with gene therapy and bone marrow transplantation.

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of mortality in the United States, continues to disproportionately impact lower income members of racial and ethnic minority groups. In a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how perceived discrimination influences smoking rates among these groups. “We found that regardless of race or ethnicity, the odds of current smoking were higher among individuals who perceived that they were treated differently because of their race, though racial and ethnic minority groups were more likely to report discrimination,” he says.