Newsroom Stories

A husband goes missing. A celebrated writer fights to form words. Two young men embark on a pharmaceutically enhanced museum tour while a shell-shocked veteran wanders the streets. Welcome to Chris Kammerer’s The Stroke Scriptures, winner of Washington University’s biennial A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, which will receive its world premiere in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.  

The Washington University Opera Workshop will perform excerpts from five beloved operas at 8 p.m. Friday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center Ballroom. The program will highlight comedy and romance with scenes from works by Gaetano Donizetti, Benjamin Britten, Otto Nicolai and Leo Delibes. 

Two new studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Washington University researchers including Timothy Ley, MD, and Richard Wilson, PhD, highlight the power of sequencing cancer patients’ genomes as a diagnostic tool, helping doctors decide the best course of treatment and researchers identify new cancer susceptibility mutations that can be passed from parent to child.

The Women’s Society honored the legacy of two of the university’s most revered women — Harriet K. Switzer and the late Elizabeth Gray Danforth — at its annual meeting April 13. The society presented the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship to three exemplary college students at the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

In recognition of national Undergraduate Research Week, April 11-15, research posters of Washington University undergraduate students were displayed on trees along Oak Walk. The Washington University Office of Undergraduate Research held a number of events last week to raise awareness about the importance of undergraduate research experiences for students’ development and engagement in a discipline.

Members of the Delta Gamma/Sigma Nu group help the annual Thurtene Carnival “Celebrate the Magic of Community” with their facade (above) and performance April 17, the final day of the three-day event. Despite a weekend of wacky weather, an estimated 35,000-40,000 attended the carnival April 15-17 on the north Brookings parking lot on the east end of campus.

In the beginning was the fig leaf. The first garment. Eden couture. “Our students always start with a leaf-inspired project because that is the beginning of fashion,” quips Jeigh Singleton, director of the Fashion Design program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. “It is the original inspiration for color, line, shape, structure, texture — all the things that we think of when we think of clothing.” On May 1, those qualities and more will be on full display as part of the Sam Fox School’s 82nd Annual Fashion Design Show.

Sports updates for week of April 18, 2011.

A mobile application called Course Monkey, which allows students to browse the WUSTL course listings quickly and easily on their iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, now is available at the Apple App Store.

Despite promising findings in the laboratory, Dominic N. Reeds, MD, and other nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that ginseng does not improve insulin sensitivity in diabetics who are overweight.