School of Medicine holds shoe drive
Washington University faculty, staff and students are encouraged to donate gently used and new shoes to raise funds for clean water in Africa.
THIS IS home.php
Five receive annual Virgil Ethic of Service awards
Ravikumar Chockalingam: 2011 Outstanding Graduate in the Brown School
Ravi Chockalingam, MD, will take what he has learned as a member of WUSTL’s inaugural Master of Public Health Program in the Brown School and apply it to public health programs locally, in his native India, and beyond. At the Brown School, Chockalingam worked his community health care worker model into his class work.
‘Chained COLA’ is the stealth Social Security benefit cut
Social Security’s yearly cost-of living adjustments (COLA) are targeted for reduction through a proposed “chained COLA” formula, and that could be a huge problem for those dependent on Social Security income. “COLA is an invaluable feature of Social Security,” says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. According to Bernstein, Republican “reformers” propose to reduce COLA claiming that the current method of calculating it overstates inflation. “This unrealistically assumes that people have the opportunity to buy lower priced substitutes when millions of people lack access to markets that offer such choices,” he says.
Exemplary teaching performance
Richard J. Smith, PhD (left), dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, visits with Arts & Sciences PhD student Rajbir Purewal and other teaching assistants after he presented them with the Arts & Sciences’ Graduate Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence during an April 25 ceremony in the Danforth University Center. The award recognizes exemplary performance by graduate teaching assistants.
Ballinger, former head of surgery department, 85
Walter F. Ballinger II, MD, former head of the Department of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine, died Friday, April 29, 2011, of pneumonia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 85.
Winners of essay competition announced by University Libraries
Four students have been named winners of the 24th annual Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition, sponsored by Washington University Libraries. The competition offers prizes to two undergraduate students and two graduate students who write short essays about their personal book collections.
Tim Bono: 2011 Outstanding Graduate in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Tim Bono, who will receive his doctorate in psychology at the May 20 Commencement, could very well be the model of an engaged WUSTL student as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. He has served the university in a myriad of roles, including most notably as the graduate student representative to the Board of Trustees and to the search committee for the dean of Arts & Sciences.
Trinkaus, Yokoyama to receive faculty achievement awards
Erik Trinkaus, PhD, considered by many to be the world’s most influential scholar of Neandertal and early modern human biology and evolution, and Wayne M. Yokoyama, MD, an internationally renowned immunologist and arthritis researcher, will receive Washington University’s 2011 faculty achievement awards, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced.
Rice’s origins point to China, genome researchers conclude
Rice originated in China, a team of genome researchers has concluded in a study tracing back thousands of years of evolutionary history through large-scale gene re-sequencing. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicate that domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research suggested domesticated rice may have two points of origin — India as well as China.