Newsroom Stories

Graham A. Colditz, MD, DrPH, a disease prevention expert at the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will be recognized April 3 for his 30 years of fighting cancer before it starts.

After it rules on the highly contested health-care debate and makes other momentous decisions this term, will the U.S. Supreme have sufficient stores of legitimacy to weather the inevitable backlash? Yes, but barely, says a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.

A symposium focusing on culture, law and development in Brazil will be held April 4-6 at WUSTL. Events — which include a keynote lecture, film, and dance and percussion workshop — are free and open to the public, with the exception of the April 6 book discussion, which is open only to WUSTL faculty and graduate students.

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its fifth biennial Young Choreographers Showcase Friday through Sunday, April 6-8 in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in ten original works created by student choreographers in the Dance Program in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

“War, Violence, and The Aftermath: Historical Memory, Literary Imagination, and Cultural Regeneration,” is the focus of an international conference to be held Friday, April 6, and Saturday, April 7, in Room 276 of the Danforth University Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mike Peters, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning and creator of the award-winning cartoon strip Mother Goose & Grimm, has been selected to give the 2012 Commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. The university’s 151st Commencement will begin at 8:30 a.m. Friday, May 18, in Brookings Quadrangle on the Danforth Campus. Peters earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from WUSTL in 1965.

Arthur Kleinman, MD, one of the world’s leading medical anthropologists, will speak on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis for the Assembly Series. His lecture, “The Quest for Moral Wisdom in Academic Life: Why William James Still Matters for the Art of Living,” will begin at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in Graham Chapel.

Philosophy makes little mention of the theater except to denounce it as a place of illusion and moral decay. Theater tends to respond by steering away from philosophy, driven by the notion that theater consists of actions, not ideas. But in The Drama of Ideas, Harvard scholar Martin Puchner, argues that despite this mutual evasion, the histories of philosophy and theater have in fact been crucially intertwined. On April 5, Puchner will present Washington University’s 10th Helen Clanton Morrin Lecture.

More than half of all cancer is preventable, and society has the knowledge to act on this information today, according to Graham A. Colditz, MD, DrPH, the Niess-Gain Professor and other public health researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Siteman Cancer Center. 

More than 600 people took part in the 4th annual “Take Steps for Kids” 5K and one-mile fundraiser March 24 on the Danforth Campus. Event organizers doubled the fundraising goal this year — and still managed to surpass it — raising more than $8,200 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri. Hosted by Washington University Club Running, “Take Steps” is the largest student-run 5K in Missouri.