Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang is one of 25 recipients of a 2014-15 Berlin Prize Fellowship. Awarded by the American Academy in Berlin, the prize includes a residential fellowship at the academy’s Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin-Wannsee. Bang will be part of the spring 2015 class and she will work on a book of poems.
Studying children with autism and their parents, researchers have found that when a child has autism, his or her parents are more likely to have autistic traits than parents who don’t have a child with an autism spectrum disorder, as measured by a survey used to identify such characteristics. Pictured is one of the study’s authors, John Constantino, MD.
One in three American adults has high blood pressure. Jessica Wagenseil, DSc, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is investigating how mechanical properties of the cardiovascular system contribute to this widespread disease.
Pirooz Eghtesady, MD, PhD, has been named the first Emerson Chair in Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. He is a professor of surgery and of pediatrics and is chief of the section of Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery at the School of Medicine.
New research from the School of Medicine’s Albert Kim, MD, PhD (left), and Hiroko Yano, PhD, helps explain how mutations in the gene that causes Huntington’s disease kill brain cells. The findings could open new opportunities for treating the fatal disorder.
As construction continues on the new Sumers Recreation Center, WUSTL students, employees and visitors are asked to note changes to area walkways and roadways. The new center will debut in August 2016.
Some clover species have two forms, one of which releases cyanide to discourage nibbling by snails and insects and the other of which does not. A scientist at Washington University in St. Louis found that this “polymorphism” has evolved independently in six different species of clover, each time by the wholesale deletion of a gene. The clover species are in a sense predisposed to develop this trait, suggesting that evolution is not entirely free form but instead bumps up against constraints.
Internationally acclaimed landscape architect Rod Barnett has been appointed chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. He will join the program Aug. 1.
The Department of Energy has awarded the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC) $14.4 million for continuing research on natural and bio-inspired systems for harvesting the sun’s energy. The center, which is hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, was one of 32 projects selected for funding from among more than 200 proposals and one of only 22 to receive second-round funding.
The Brown School’s Michael Sherraden and the School of Law’s Marion G. Crain, co-authors of the new book “Working and Living in the Shadow of Economic Fragility,” were in Washington, D.C., May 28 at the New America Foundation for a webcast presentation that Crain called “a chance for scholars to talk to the world.” U.S. economic policies have failed to restore full employment and in some ways have made labor market conditions worse for many Americans, they said.
