Symposium on the future of engineering and science will coincide with the dedication of WUSTL’s Green Hall

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis will dedicate a new building, Preston M. Green Hall, Friday, Sept. 23, and in conjunction will hold the symposium “Challenges & Opportunities in Engineering Education & Research.” The symposium, which will feature National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh, DSc, is open to the public. It will be held from at 2:30 p.m. in Room 300 of the Laboratory Sciences building on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus. 

New Freund Fellows announced

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have announced the selection of the next two Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows. Chelsea Knight, a New York-based artist whose narrative-based videos, photographs and participatory performances explore the nature of social control and the current state of democracy, will serve as the Freund Fellow for the 2011-12 academic year. Stih & Schnock, a Berlin-based collaborative team that focuses on issues relating to collective memory, will be Freund Fellows for 2012-13.

Centennial Celebration: Cell Biology and Physiology

The Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will mark its 100th anniversary with a month-long series of events in October, including lectures and a symposium featuring some of today’s most visionary scientific thinkers.

Bodies at Play: Japan Embodied seminars resume Sept. 23

Japanese fashion history
Japanese body art, elaborate tattoos, fashion and pre-modern pornography are among topics to be explored as the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis opens its fall seminar series. The Japan Embodied: New Approaches to Japanese Studies seminar series opens at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, in Room 18, Busch Hall, on the Danforth Campus with a free, public program on body ornamentation in Japanese culture.

‘From Hegel to Freud and Kafka’ Oct. 4, 5 and 6

The voice is commonly understood as a vehicle for communicating meaning and, alternatively, as a source of aesthetic pleasure — approaches personified by the military commander and the opera singer. But in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar proposes a third paradigm: psychoanalysis. In October, Dolar, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor, will lead a three-day series, titled “From Hegel to Freud and Kafka,” exploring the linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the voice, as well as its use by Sigmund Freud, Georg W.F. Hegel and Franz Kafka.

CNISS fall lecture series kicks off Sept. 21

Washington University in St. Louis’ Center for New Institutional Social Science (CNISS) Fall 2011 Seminar Series kicks off Wednesday, Sept. 21 with a lecture by noted social policy expert John Gal, PhD. He is dean of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gal will present “Immigration and the Categorical Welfare State in Israel” at 1 p.m. Sept. 21 in Seigle Hall, Room 301.

Washington People: Igor Efimov

Raised in a secret town in Siberia and trained in control theory for ICBM guidance, Igor Efimov, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, wouldn’t be working at WUSTL had the Soviet Union not broken up immediately after he defended his dissertation in biophysics, providing him an opportunity to leave. His research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then pausing before repeating.