Zhang wins Olin Award for research on Alibaba packing time

Dennis Zhang, assistant professor of operations and manufacturing management at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2020 Olin Award for research that creates a human-focused algorithm to improve warehouse workers’ packing time while also reducing material costs.

Sanchez Prado appointed Library of Congress Kluge Chair

Library of Congress
The John W. Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress has appointed Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, as the 2020 Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South.

Battling treatment resistant opioid use disorder

Similar to treatment resistant depression, there is a subpopulation of those addicted to opioids who do not respond to standard opioid use disorder treatments. In a new paper, an addiction expert at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis suggests a new category for these types of patients: treatment resistant opioid use disorder.

Heroes, theater and suspensions of disbelief

Ten brave men board four wooden skiffs for a pioneering journey across the vast, uncharted American West. Except that sites they discover are well known to countless generations of native peoples. And the rivers they float are theatrical sets. And the men on the boats are not men.

Walking the wire: Real-time imaging helps reveal active sites of photocatalysts

sun to energy
Nanoscale photocatalysts are small, man-made particles that harvest energy from sunlight to produce liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. A new imaging solution developed at Washington University in St. Louis reveals the significance of a particular structural feature — clusters of oxygen vacancies — in achieving high photocatalytic activity.

Barch elected to head AAAS psychology section

Deanna M. Barch
Deanna Barch, professor and chair of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, was chosen as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s chair-elect of its Section on Psychology. She will begin her role as chair in February 2021.

Liu receives NASA grant to study primitive meteorites

Nan Liu, research assistant professor in physics in Arts & Sciences, received a $493,885 grant from NASA to study presolar grains in primitive meteorites. Under her new project, “Isotopic Characterization of Presolar Supernova Grains: Constraints on Dust Formation and Nucleosynthesis in Type II Supernovae,” Liu will obtain isotopic and structural compositions of presolar grains from ancient supernovae […]