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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.

Over the past several decades, Michael Kinch of Washington University in St. Louis says, the pharmaceutical industry has managed to dismantle itself. In a provocative series of articles and interviews, Kinch, the director of the Center for Research Innovation in Businessat the university, has been describing the history of this dismantling and its implications for the future of medicine.

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.

UPDATE: Washington University in St. Louis will test its emergency communication system, WUSTLAlerts, at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, rather than Thursday, Sept. 25, as previously scheduled. The test will take place unless there is a potential for severe weather or an emergency is occurring. WUSTLAlerts will send emails to @wustl.edu addresses and text messages to cellphones.

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.

A cancer odyssey​ Inspired by his childhood physicians, Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, knew at a young age what he wanted to become. Along the way, he has journeyed from his native India to the U.S. and helped to navigate the frontiers of cancer care.

The nip in the air is a reminder not only of the coming autumn but of flu season. And for any Washington University employee who works with or near patients, it means it’s time to get a flu shot.