Newsroom Stories

Giving children intravenous fluids early in the course of an E. coli O157:H7 infection appears to lower the odds of developing severe kidney failure, according to Christina Ahn Hickey, MD, and other researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions.

Dzenana Mruckovski, former public works director for the city of Crestwood, Mo., is the new director of facilities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, announced Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

There’s a better way to help banking customers than the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that opened for business July 21, says a banking expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease may be detectable as many as 20 years before problems with memory and thinking develop, scientists reported July 20 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris.

The world today feels increasingly globalized and interconnected, yet also increasingly precarious, as old certainties — historical, ideological and material — give way to ever-present threats of climate change, economic collapse and terrorism. This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany, one of four major exhibitions slated for the 2011-12 academic year. Also opening in the fall will be Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, followed in the spring by John Stezaker, the first major solo museum exhibition of works by this contemporary British artist, and Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time.

A simple cut to the skin unleashes a complex cascade of chemistry to stem the flow of blood. Now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have used evolutionary clues to reveal how a key clotting protein self-assembles. The finding sheds new light on common bleeding disorders.

Washington University in St. Louis School of Law is offering a Washington, D.C., area intellectual property field placement opportunity for students pursuing a career focused on the preparation, filing and prosecution of patent applications. Students in the externship will work at the law firm of Oliff & Berridge in Alexandria, Va., for one semester. “Our students will be expected to perform as a first-year associate,” says David Deal, JD, director of WULAW’s Intellectual Property & Technology Law Program and co-director of the Intellectual Property and Nonprofit Organizations Legal Clinic at WULAW. This program is designed to immerse WULAW students in a law firm environment and facilitate the transition from law students to competent and productive practitioners.

Student Financial Services can help departments hire part-time student workers for the 2011-12 academic year. Departments hiring eligible federal work-study students pay only 50 percent of the student’s total earnings; the other 50 percent is covered with U.S. Department of Education funding. Work-study-eligible undergraduates worked in more than 170 university departments and offices during the 2010-11 academic year, and their work activities ranged from coordinating university-wide blood drives to serving as tutors.

Workers remove sections of roof on Umrath Hall July 7 and 8. Umrath Hall closed June 20 for a complete renovation of the interior of the building. Once the yearlong renovation is finished, the building will feature a new roof and interior walls, floors and ceiling finishes, along with new HVAC, fire protection and electrical systems.

A two-mile section of the Centennial Greenway, a planned 20-mile trail that crosses WUSTL’s Danforth Campus, is nearly complete. A dedication for the Melville/Delmar stretch of the greenway is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday, July 29, at the newly created pedestrian plaza just east of Fitz’s American Grill & Bottling Works on Delmar Boulevard.