Newsroom Stories

Clarissa Cagnato, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, was among more than 60 graduate students who presented research during the 17th annual Graduate Research Symposium Feb. 18. The symposium provides graduate students an opportunity to present their research to a broad and diverse audience and gain important communications skills in the process.

It is a harrowing prologue. Teenagers Brooke and Alex, high school sweethearts, panicked by an accidental pregnancy, rent a hotel room to deliver their stillborn child. So opens The Lost Daughter, the sixth and most recent novel by St. Louis native Lucy Ferriss. On Tuesday, March 6, Ferriss, writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Liviu M. Mirica, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious research fellowship from the Sloan Foundation. Mirica will use the funds to develop novel catalysts that will be able to efficiently convert the greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) into useful chemicals.

Lawrence G. Lenke, MD, has been appointed chief of spinal surgery in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He succeeds Keith H. Bridwell, MD, head of the spine service for the past 28 years.

Chancellor Marks S. Wrighton slices the cake in celebration of George Washington’s birthday Feb. 20 in Tisch Commons, Danforth University Center. George Washington Week, an annual tradition celebrating the university’s namesake, is sponsored by the sophomore honorary Lock and Chain.

Pat Hollinger, a junior majoring in philosophy in Arts & Sciences, placed first out of 10 poets who performed Feb. 17 during the the Fourth Annual Poetry Grand Slam in Edison Theatre. Hollinger performed before three poems before a packed crowd of about 800. He and four other WUSTL poets will represent the university in the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational in Ontario, Calif., April 18-21.

The U.S. Constitution’s global influence is on the decline, finds a new study by David S. Law, JD, PhD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Other countries are increasingly turning to sources other than the U.S. Constitution for guidance in establishing human rights provisions and for general structural provisions in creating their constitutions,” he says. Law, with co-author Mila Versteeg, DPhil, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, analyzed 60 years of data on the content of the world’s constitutions. “The data revealed that there is a significant and growing generic component to global constitutionalism, in the form of a set of rights provisions that appear in nearly all formal constitutions,” Law says. “Our analysis also confirms, however, that the U.S. Constitution is becoming increasingly out of sync with these global practices.

Cosima Wagner awoke to the sound of music. Her husband, the composer Richard Wagner, had risen early and arranged a 15-piece orchestra on the stairs outside their bedroom. It was the first performance of his Siegfried Idyll, a birthday gift composed for Cosima and titled for their infant son. On Feb. 24, the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ward Stare will perform the Siegfried Idyll, along with Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Mike McLaughlin has had a difficult life. The MBA student at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis was emotionally and physically abused as a child at the hands of his mother and stepfather — a tragedy in its own right but one in which he says helped prepare him for his next big challenge: through-hiking the Appalachian and Ozark trails back-to-back.

Disease-causing bacteria’s efforts to resist antibiotics may get help from their distant bacterial relatives that live in the soil, new research by Kevin Forsberg, a graduate student at Washington University School of Medicine suggests. The researchers found identical genes for antibiotic resistance in soil bacteria and in pathogens from clinics around the world.