Newsroom Stories

Seethu Seetharaman, PhD, W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School will speak May 17 in Kansas City about marketing in the digital age.

Sports updates for the week of May 16, 2011.

Researchers at Washington University and King’s College London have independently identified DNA on chromosome 3 that appears to be related to depression. The new studies identify a DNA region containing up to 90 genes. Both are published May 16 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. 

Washington University in St. Louis hydrogeologist Robert Criss, PhD, wasn’t particularly surprised by the spring floods on the Mississippi this year. Floods are becoming more frequent and more severe, he says. “We are increasingly constraining the river by building wing dikes and higher levees and then upping the ante by building in the river’s natural flood plains” Criss says. “There are far better ways to deal with this problem than have municipalities compete with one another to build the highest levee and fight over who has the right to be protected in times of distress.”

Within a year of starting classes at WUSTL, Kirsten Siebach, Outstanding Graduate in the College of Arts & Sciences, became the youngest member of the Phoenix Mars Lander science team in Tucson, Ariz. She’ll graduate May 20 with a double major in earth and planetary sciences and chemistry and a minor in English.

Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science checks out the hand glider designed and built by Fort Zumwalt West students during the Boeing Engineering Challenge May 6 at the Athletic Complex. About 180 high school students from 10 area school districts launched hand gliders from the Field House balcony in a competition to determine which has the farthest flight, the straightest path, the longest hang time and highest quality of flight.

Commencement week begins with a variety of celebrations and ceremonies designed to warmly send Washington University in St. Louis’ Class of 2011 out into the world. First up: The Chancellor’s Dinner to Honor Graduating Seniors at 6 p.m. Monday, May 16. More than 1,200 are expected at America’s Center ballroom as Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and the WUSTL community celebrates the accomplishments of the class and acknowledges its positive impact.

Applications are being accepted for new internal grant award program that provides seed funding for new interdisciplinary collaborative research projects.

Ron Cytron, PhD, professor and associate chair of computer science and engineering, was named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellow. The ACM fellowship recognizes the contributions of leaders in the computing field. … Anthony Fehr, a doctoral student in the Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis Program, received the $250 David M. Kipnis Award in […]

Federal investment in biomedical research is a major driver of jobs and economic activity. Two new reports highlight the ripple effects of this investment. One report, by the nonprofit coalition United for Medical Research, concludes that in 2010 alone, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) directly and indirectly supported nearly 500,000 jobs and produced nearly […]