Newsroom Stories

Traditional product advertising — full-page magazine ads and 30-second television commercials — may be going the way of the rotary phone. Emerging concepts such as crowdsourcing, viral Internet campaigns, product placements and guerilla promotions will dominate the marketing and advertising landscape in 2012 and beyond, says a marketing expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Students, faculty and staff at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis assist the Marine Corps with their annual Toys for Tots drive to help families in the St. Louis area. Monica Matthieu, PhD, research assistant professor at the Brown School, and SSgt. Scott Hogle, USMC, comment on the school’s successful effort.

Some WUSTL news stories never get old, and some just get better with time. WUSTL news editors picked 11 stories from 2011 — some new, some old — but all worth a second look as we head into 2012.

Lead pipes once used routinely in municipal water distribution systems are a well-recognized source of dangerous lead contamination, but new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that the partial replacement of these pipes can make the problem worse. The research shows that joining old lead pipes with new copper lines using brass fittings spurs galvanic corrosion that can dramatically increase the amount of lead released into drinking water supplies.

Any multicellular animal poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of its cells will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes. Given the incentive for cheating, how is cooperation among the cells enforced? In the Dec. 16 issue of the journal Science, Washington University in St. Louis biologists Joan Strassmann and David Queller suggest the answer is frequent population bottlenecks that restart populations from a single cell.

Rita A. Stanley arrived at the School of Law in 1995. Since then, the scenery and her duties changed, but a constant was excellent co-workers. “People were the reason I loved it here,” Stanley says. Stanley, along with the other 102 staff members who retired from the university this past year, contributed a total of 2,023 years of service to the university — more than two millennia.

Jordan Teisher, a doctoral student in evolution, ecology and population biology, and Jeremy King, a doctoral student in plant biology, have been named the first Monsanto graduate fellows at Washington University.

There is an undeniable romanticism to the sculpture of Patrick Dougherty. Working with the simplest of materials — sticks, branches and saplings — the North Carolina-based artist creates playful architectural forms that variously suggest nests, primitive shelters and fairy-tale castles. This fall, Dougherty enlisted dozens of students to help construct Double or Nothing, a new commission for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Constitutional courts worldwide are increasingly turning to legal arguments and ideas from other countries for guidance and inspiration. But scholarly interest in the growing judicial use of foreign law paints a very misleading picture of the globalization of constitutional law, says David Law, JD, PhD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that for those who want to see the U.S. Supreme Court make greater and more sophisticated use of foreign law, encouraging its members or inviting them to additional conferences and gatherings is likely to have little impact. “At this point in time, the greatest obstacle to judicial comparativism in the United States is not the unwillingness of individual judges to consider foreign legal materials, it is the current political economy of the American legal education.”  

Seethu Seetharaman, PhD, was recently installed as the W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. The ceremony, held Oct. 26 in the Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center, included welcoming remarks by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and an address by Seetharaman.