Newsroom Stories

Peter M.J. Burgers, PhD, has been named the Marvin A. Brennecke Professor of Biological Chemistry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

A Washington University in St. Louis team is participating in the modENCODE project, a massive ongoing effort to map all the elements in model organisms that affect whether genes are silenced or expressed. The work supports the more complex ENCODE project, which is tasked to map the same elements in the human genome. While the genome is the same in every cell, each cell type expresses a different set of genes. In people, moreover, roughly 95 percent of the genome is silenced. Together the projects will “put flesh on the bones” of the Human Genome Project, says team leader Sarah C.R. Elgin.

Bloomberg Businessweek Obama in Arizona means moment to alter an image of ‘detachment’ 01/12/2011 In Arizona today, President Barack Obama will confront a moment of national pain that presents him with a chance to establish a new bond with the American people. Obama “has to walk a careful line in which he’s not accusing, but […]

“The Past is Alive … The Work is Not Yet Done” is the theme of Washington University in St. Louis’ 24th annual celebration honoring Martin Luther King Jr. at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 17, in Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus. Events will aslo take place at the School of Medicine, the Brown School and the School of Law.

CQ Today Politicians plan strategies aimed at changing filibuster rules in Congress 1/05/2011 In an attempt to avoid a knock-down partisan battle over proposals to overcome Senate filibusters with a simple majority vote, Democrats proposed changes Wednesday that would take more-modest steps to reduce the minority’s power to slow or block Senate action. “They are […]

F. Edmund Hunter Jr., professor emeritus of developmental biology, died Sunday, Jan. 2, 2011, of natural causes in St. Louis. He was 94.

On Jan. 12, 2010, Lora Iannotti, PhD, nutrition and public health expert at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, was in Leogane, a seaside town 18 miles west of Port au Prince, Haiti, working with local officials on improving the health of Haitian children. That’s when a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake struck the poverty-stricken country. Its epicenter, Leogane. Iannotti survived, but some 230,000 perished. Haiti was devastated; an estimated 3 million were affected by the earthquake in a country already known as the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Since last January, Iannotti, assistant professor at the Brown School, has returned to Haiti a number of times to continue her work on undernutrition and disease prevention in young children. She is back in Haiti again, one year later.

Three Washington University faculty — two from the School of Medicine and one from Arts & Sciences — have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

The No. 5 women’s basketball team hit three 3-pointers with under a minute to play but was unable to come back from an 11-point second-half deficit in a 73-71 loss at the University of Chicago in the University Athletic Association (UAA) opener for both teams Jan. 8.

The men’s basketball team split a pair of games last week to drop its overall record to 6-5. Freshman Tim Cooney recorded the first double-double of his career with 13 points and a career-high 11 rebounds to lead the Bears to a 67-52 home victory over Benedictine University Jan. 4. Cooney was one of four players to score in double figures for Washington University.