WashU Experts

Prepare for a Super Bowl broadcast rife with social-issue and cause advertisements, because that’s what younger generations — read: consumers — want from a Sunday less about football than marketing, says Olin sports marketing expert Patrick Rishe.

Does this recent extreme cold snap spell bad news for mosquitoes and ticks this summer? Not necessarily. Researchers at Tyson Research Center, the environmental field station for Washington University in St. Louis, offer insight into how both insects are surviving the Polar Vortex that has gripped most of the Midwest and eastern United States.

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.

When 800,000 government employees eventually return to work after a shutdown that started Dec. 22, expect them to work less efficiently — or, at minimum, feel less engaged and far less respected, says an expert in government leadership and organizational strategy at Olin Business School.

The legality, let alone the wisdom, of closing the southern border amid a partial government shutdown is called into question by Stephen Legomsky, an immigration-law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

There is no secret to happiness, but there is a science to it, says Tim Bono, a psychology lecturer in Arts & Sciences who teaches courses on happiness at  Washington University in St. Louis.

Bills passed by Republican-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and two years ago in North Carolina to limit the power in incoming Democratic governors may be the new normal, says a constitutional law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

The many scientists behind the National Climate Assessment, released the day after Thanksgiving, have provided something of a price tag, says a Washington University in St. Louis expert on mitigation and sequestration.

Even the youngest students are ready to learn about climate science, according to Michael Wysession, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Teaching Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

As an economist, academician and researcher steeped in such data and assessments, one Washington University in St. Louis expert wants to press the pause button on the worst-case-scenario numbers related to the National Climate Assessment that was released the day after Thanksgiving.