Newsroom Stories

Students kicked off Commencement Week May 17 with an evening of celebration in downtown St. Louis. More than 1,200 graduating seniors gathered for the Chancellor’s Dinner and Senior Gala.

Haoyi Wang, PhD, helped develop a technique for mapping all the genes in a cell that respond to a particular genetic switch while earning his doctorate from WUSTL. Wang is the Record‘s 2010 Outstanding Graduate in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Four faculty have been recruited to Washington University School of Medicine through its Faculty Diversity Scholars Program.

The three witches on the stormy heath had no trouble foretelling Macbeth’s kingly future. But seven or eight decades ago, those hags would have had a harder time choosing one storyline for a young Lawrence Kahn. He had a rich and complex life ahead of him.

Toronto architect Nevena Krilic has won Washington University’s 2010 Steedman Fellowship in Architecture International Design Competition. Sponsored by the College of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the biennial competition is open to young architects from around the world and carries a $30,000 first place award to support study and research abroad — the largest such award in the United States.  

In a first-of-a-kind collaboration between academia and industry, Pfizer Inc. will give scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis unprecedented access to information regarding more than 500 pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical candidates in a partnership that focuses on discovering new uses for existing compounds.

Ann Bingham has been named director of the WUSTL Family Learning Center, an on-campus 19,900-square-foot child-care center scheduled to open Sept. 7. The Family Learning Center is being built on the North Campus and will offer care for 156 children of faculty, staff and students from the ages of 6 weeks to 6 years.

At last count there were three physics PhDs in Congress, five science PhDs total, and 228 senators and congressmen with law degrees. WUSTL postdoctoral fellow in physics Chris Spitzer, who has just been named a Congressional Science Fellow for 2010-2011, is off to Washington to learn and observe but also to do what he can to make sure national policy in areas such as energy and the environment reflects current scientific understanding.

A new Guinness World Record was set May 16 at the Athletic Complex as 710 WUSTL seniors and administrators formed the longest human shoulder massage chain in history. The previous record of 617 people was set in January in Canada. Students will submit the event to Guinness for verification and to be listed on the organization’s website as an official world record.

Peter K. Cramer, PhD, has been named new assistant dean of graduate programs in the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. His duties include coordinating recruitment, admissions and placement of the law school’s graduate programs and for the day-to-day operations of those programs. This summer, the law school is launching a new executive LLM program co-taught by law faculty at WUSTL and Korea University.