Notables

Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a prestigious BRAIN Initiative Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Wang’s three-year, $2.7 million award, is one of 58 grants totaling $46 million announced Sept. 30 by Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, director of the NIH, in Washington, D.C.

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received a four-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for her work titled “XPS: FULL: FP: Collaborative Research: Taming Parallelism: Optimally Exploiting High-throughput Parallel Architectures.”

Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a commission from Chamber Music America, the national network of chamber music professionals, to compose a piece for the New York-based duo New Morse Code.

Over the course of about 24 hours Sept. 22-23, four student athletes from Washington University in St. Louis were tabbed by national coaches’ organizations as “Athlete of the Week.” It’s an unprecedented honor in school history, one in which Athletics Director Josh Whitman calls “inspirational.” To put it into perspective, the university received only six such honors throughout the entire academic sports year in 2013-14.

Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, a disease-prevention expert at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will receive a national award for his contributions to cancer prevention research.

The St. Louis Rams have selected Virginia Braxs, senior lecturer in Romance languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences, as a recipient of the NFL Hispanic Heritage Leadership Award.

Raj Jain, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, was selected to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Alumni Association, among other honors.

Ross C. Brownson, PhD, professor at the Brown School and at the School of Medicine, has been awarded a $365,600 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute for his project “A Cross-country Comparison of Evidence-based Prevention of Cancer.”

Kelli VanDussen, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the (Thaddeus) Stappenbeck Lab, has received a three-year, $174,750 grant from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America for research titled “Defining The Basis of Epithelial Defects in Crohn’s Disease Patients.”

Six energy, environmental and chemical engineering faculty in the School of Engineering & Applied Science have received nearly $1.8 million in three-year grants from the National Science Foundation to work toward creating a cleaner, safer environment.