On Monday, Feb. 18, alumna Susannah Cahalan will read from her new memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, as part of the Assembly Series. The book focuses on her ordeal with a rare and terrifying disease. A panel discussion will follow. The event, free and open to the public, will be held at 5 p.m. in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium.
Washington University in St. Louis’ Institute for School Partnership (ISP) and its signature science education program, MySci, take a major step forward Monday, Feb. 18, when they open the MySci Resource Center at 6601 Vernon Ave. Refurbished with the help of a $2.2 million grant from the Monsanto Fund, the MySci Resource Center becomes the nerve center of the ISP, WUSTL’s signature effort to strategically improve teaching and learning within the K-12 education community in the St. Louis region.
Faculty, staff and students are invited to enroll in “Be the Match,” a national bone marrow registry, at various times and locations on Wednesday, Feb. 13. Registration takes only 20 minutes and a cheek swab, and no appointment is necessary.
Cindy Brantmeier, PhD, associate professor of Spanish and applied linguistics in Arts & Sciences, was recently honored as Washington University’s recipient of the 2012 Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award. The annual award from Emerson recognizes top educators from the St. Louis region for their passion for teaching, their impact on student learning and their knowledge and creativity.
Four researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are being honored as outstanding scientists by the Academy of Science of St. Louis.
A Washington University retina specialist is one of 10 U.S. scientists selected by the National Eye Institute for an innovative project to improve or restore vision. The winning proposal from vitreoretinal surgery fellow Rajesh C. Rao, MD, was chosen from nearly 500 entries. Rao was the youngest winner in the national competition.
The new Stamps Leadership Scholarship will award the full cost of undergraduate attendance to an average of five incoming freshmen each year. This unique program also includes an enrichment fund of $10,000 per student to be used over four years to pay for outside-the-classroom educational experiences such as study abroad, research or unpaid internships.
While it is not unprecedented for a pope to resign from his position, it is unprecedented for a pope to resign for health reasons — as Pope Benedict XVI plans to do at the end of the month — says a leading historian of religion at Washington University in St. Louis. Daniel M. Bornstein, PhD, the Stella Koetter Darrow Professor in Catholic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, says that Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation stands out as different from previous ones, but not simply because of his medical reasons. “Previous resignations either resulted from or led to grave crises in leadership. I do not see either of those as a concern in this case,”
Bornstein says.
Charlottesville, Va. recently became the first town
in the U.S. to pass an anti-drone resolution, calling for a restriction
on the use of the unmanned surveillance vehicles. “For drones, I
think the problem is that they do have some legitimate law enforcement
purposes, but they raise massive problems of invasion of privacy and
government surveillance that we need to think through before we deploy
drones in vast numbers in our skies,” says Neil Richards, professor of
law at Washington University in St. Louis.
Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business
School, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in
Herzliya, Israel, and Onward Israel, is launching an Israel Summer
Business Academy, aimed at providing students an opportunity to
learn firsthand about business in Israel, one of the most vibrant hubs
of entrepreneurship in the world.