“Sam Durant: Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.” opens Friday, Jan. 23, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The large-scale installation consists of 30 minimalist sculptures, each appropriating the form of an existing monument to white and Indian victims killed between the 17th century and the end of the so-called Indian Wars in 1890.
Before Twitter and Facebook, message boards and the Internet, the backyard clothesline was a universal destination for news, gossip, work and socializing. On Friday, Jan. 16, Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon will bring “The Clothesline Muse,” a multidisciplinary performance celebrating domestic labor and community empowerment, to Edison Theatre as part of the Edison Ovations Series.
New work shows that bacteria (and probably other cells as well) don’t double in mass before dividing. Instead they add a constant volume (or mass) no matter what their initial size. A small cell adds the same volume as a large cell. By following this rule a cell population quickly converges on a common size.
Lihong Wang, PhD, continues to build on his groundbreaking technology that allows light deep inside living tissue during imaging and therapy. In the Jan. 5 issue of Nature Communications, Wang, the Gene K. Beare Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, reveals for the first time a new technique that focuses diffuse light inside a dynamic scattering medium containing living tissue.
Gaya Amarasinghe, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology and of biochemisry and molecular biophysics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has received three grants from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Thaddeus Stappenbeck, PhD, MD, and Matthew Ciorba, MD, assistant professor of medicine, both of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, have received a one-year, $152,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Oregon Health & Science University for research titled “Influence of Gene-environment Interactions on Innate Immune Function.”
New research demonstrates that obesity does not always go hand in hand with metabolic changes in the body that can lead to diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Washington University School of Medicine researchers found that a subset of obese people do not have common metabolic abnormalities associated with obesity, and they don’t develop them when they gain more weight.
Shankar Sastry, PhD, professor of engineering, has been awarded the Hind Rattan Award from the NRI Welfare Society of India. The award recognizes nonresident Indians who have made exceptional contributions to society.
In 2014, Washington University continued to play a major role in the St. Louis community while students and alumni made their mark on campus. Among the stories were the debut of the $80 million Lofts of Washington University, a continued investment in Cortex, the innovation district, and two unforgettable alumni.
Rebecca Copeland, PhD, is one of two winners of the 2014-15 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for her translation of Kirino Natsuo’s “The Goddess Chronicle.” She is chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
