Record

Ralph G. Dacey Jr., MD, the Henry G. and Edith R. Schwartz Professor and head of the Department of Neurosurgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, became president of the Society of Neurological Surgeons (SNS) May 22, 2012.

Beginning Wednesday, May 30, the Record shifts into its summer schedule. Look for weekly emails on in your inbox each Wednesday through the middle of August. The website, record.wustl.edu, will continue to be updated regularly daily. Have a great summer!

A memorial service in honor of Michael J. Welch, PhD, who was a faculty member for more than four decades at Washington University in St. Louis, will be held at 3 p.m. June 4 in Graham Chapel.

Due to the closure of Forsyth Boulevard and Throop Drive this summer for construction, the WUSTL Campus Circulator will follow a revised route on the Danforth Campus beginning Tuesday, May 22. 

A section of Throop Drive that runs in front of Eliot Hall on the north side of the Danforth Campus will close beginning Monday, May 28, for the construction of Knight and Bauer halls for the Olin Business School. Throop will remain closed to both vehicular and pedestrian traffic until construction is completed in early March 2014.

This year, for the first time, a free Student Services Professional Development Conference is being offered to the entire WUSTL staff. The response to past conferences has been overwhelmingly positive, and topics have broad appeal. Breakout sessions will focus on local, national and international university initiatives. The conference is Thursday, May 24.

Sophia Hayes, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, leaning toward an economics major when she stumbled into a quantum mechanics class and then a chemistry class with a collaborative research focus. Research projects were the hook, and “I crammed the chemistry major into my last two years,” Hayes says.

Maranda Witherspoon has agreed to co-lead a group of community members and public health experts who are working to improve cancer prevention and care in medically underserved populations.

Forsyth Boulevard between Olympian Way and Wallace Drive will be closed to through traffic from May 22 through August as WUSTL partners with the city of Clayton to replace the Forsyth bridge. Construction will officially begin on the project in late May following Commencement. Forsyth is anticipated to reopen in August, which is planned to coincide with the reopening of the underpass to pedestrian traffic.

Michael J. Welch, PhD, a pioneering radiochemist who was the author of more than 550 papers on the use of radioactive drugs in diagnosis and treatment of disease, died Sunday, May 6, 2012. He was 72.