Washington People

Melissa Hopkins, assistant vice chancellor and assistant dean of facilities operations at the School of Medicine, excels at multi-tasking. At work, she oversees facilities engineering, design and construction, support services, business operations and protective services. At home, she and her husband have three children with plans to adopt three more. Further, she also shares custody of three children and has three adult sons from a previous marriage.

​​​Serving Washington University in St. Louis students for five decades, Lorena Smith, 81, has  done it all — prepared thousands of  sandwiches, pulled pints of beer at the university’s long-gone campus bar and issued parking tickets. “Some things don’t change,” said Smith, whom the students refer to as “Ms. Smitty.” “There have always been parking tickets, baby, always.” ​

Seven things you should know about the energetic and driven Josh Whitman, the John M. Schael Director of Athletics at Washington University in St. Louis, who is six months into the job and working nonstop to build an already-successful athletics department into the best in NCAA Division III.

Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, is a professor of developmental biology and of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Over the past three decades, his research has shed light on the processes of aging and longevity as he has sought to help people maintain better health into later years.

For Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, drawing is both an expressive art and a daily practice. At the office or in the studio, a sketchbook is always near at hand.

The nuclear pharmacist with a flair for design is working to keep Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the forefront of research and patient care.

Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, discusses The Divided City, the nature of the humanities and the health of the field today.

After fleeing his war-torn homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Justin Serugo was relocated to St. Louis, where he eventually landed a job at the School of Medicine. He now works on a childhood malnutrition project.

Former Army Sgt. Mike Pereira lost a little bit of himself after a friend and fellow veteran shot himself. But Pereira found that, through service, veterans could find purpose, community and healing. Today, he serves dying veterans at hospice and, as a University College student at Washington University in St. Louis, conducts rigorous research about veterans who volunteer in their communities. 

Beau Ances, MD, PhD, is using the latest brain scanning techniques to better understand how long-term HIV infection impairs memory and other mental functions. He’s also applying his expertise in neuroimaging to Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative disorders.