Newsroom Stories

On the heels of the St. Louis Cardinals’ appearance in the World Series, one of baseball’s greatest fans will give the keynote address to the annual Founder’s Day celebration at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to the Pulitizer Prize-winning historian’s remarks, Founders Day 2011 will feature the presentation of the Distinguished Faculty Awards, the Distinguished Alumni Awards and the Robert S. Brookings Awards.

Junior quarterback Dan Burkett threw for two touchdowns and ran for another score as the WUSTL football team posted a 24-21 win at Oberlin College Oct. 22. Updates also included on men’s and women’s soccer.

At the bottom of plants’ ability to sense touch, gravity or the proximity of a nearby trellis are mechanosensitive channels, pores through the cells’ plasma membrane that are opened and closed by the deformation of the membrane. Elizabeth Haswell, PhD, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is studying the roles these channels play in Arabidopsis plants by growing mutant plants that lack one or more of the 10 possible channel proteins in this species.

From its humble beginning as a mimeographed, five-page news-sheet to today’s four-color, 36-page, high-quality glossy magazine and multimedia online presence, Outlook magazine has long been the featured source of information about the people and events of Washington University School of Medicine. Now complete issues of Outlook, from 1964-2011, are available in PDF format.

A string quartet from the St. Louis Symphony will join pianist Seth Carlin, professor of music in Arts & Sciences, and mezzo-soprano Debra Hillabrand, teacher of applied music, for a free concert featuring the music of Johannes Brahms (1833-97). Sponsored by the Department of Music and the St. Louis Symphony Community Partnership program, the performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Visiting choreographer Ting-Ting Chang (in black, second from the front) leads a master class in modern dance for the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences Oct. 4 in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building. Chang, artistic director of the company DreamDance, was in residence with the PAD Oct. 2-7. In addition to leading master classes, she worked with students to set a piece for Kinetic Field Work, the 2011 Washington University Dance Theatre concert, which takes place Dec. 2-4 in Edison Theatre.

At the age of five, Jock Soto watched a performance of George Balanchine’s Jewels on television and began studying ballet soon thereafter. Later, in a professional career that would stretch 24 years, Soto danced dozens of principal roles — many of which he originated — with the New York City Ballet. At 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26, Soto, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Performing Arts Department, will introduce a public screening of Water Flowing Together, a documentary film about his remarkable life.

Highlights include WUSTL law professor Brian Tamanaha on job market for law school graduates (U.S. News & World Report); Olin’s Carol Johanek discussing a new dog food commercial that features high-frequency noises only dogs can hear (Discovery News); and coverage of a WUSTL architecture competition that highlights the Jewish Sukkot holiday (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). More>>>

Front-of-package nutrition labels already exist on many foods in the U.S., but an Institute of Medicine (IOM) panel recently recommended standardizing and simplifying this information through a rating system modeled after the Energy Star program. “You shouldn’t have to be a nutrition scientist to make healthy food choices for your family,” says Matthew Kreuter, PhD, member of the IOM panel and director of the Health Communications Research Laboratory at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Approximately 1,500 members of the Class of 2015 arrived on campus this past August. The freshman class was selected from nearly 29,000 applicants, and approximately half are female and half male. And they have been acclimating well, thanks to welcome events and advice from WUSTL upperclassmen, faculty and staff.