Notables

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.

Keke Fairfax, PhD, research instructor in pathology and immunology at the School of Medicine, has received a four-year, $308,000 grant from the American Heart Association for research titled “Understanding the Development of the Liver B Cell Compartment During Schistosomiasis: Development of a Novel Vaccine.”

Douglas A. Wiens, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected to receive the 2014 Robert L. and Bettie P. Cody Award in Ocean Sciences.

Joseph Corbo, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and immunology, of genetics and of ophthalmology and visual sciences, has received a one-year, $25,000 grant from the Center for the Investigation of Membrane Excitability Diseases for research titled “High-Throughput Functional Analysis of Non-Coding Regions Related to Arrhythmias.”