Arts & Sciences

In a business famed for slow and patient aging, it’s been a meteoric rise. Just six years ago, former WashU roommates David Mandell and Daniel Linde stood on a rolling cornfield at the eastern edge of Bardstown, Kentucky. Today, the 100-acre site is home to their Bardstown Bourbon Company, already one of the world’s largest bourbon distilleries.

James H. Buckley, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, received a $4.9 million award from NASA to build a demonstration version of a large satellite experiment for gamma-ray astronomy research. Washington University leads the entire effort to develop the instrument, which is planned to launch on a scientific balloon in 2024.

Michael Landry, the William Chauvenet Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in Arts & Sciences, won a $150,000 postdoctoral research fellowship from the National Science Foundation. He will work with Steven Frankel, assistant professor.

Francesco Di Plinio, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, won a $197,616 grant from the National Science Foundation for research in harmonic analysis, a branch of mathematics concerned with the rigorous description of signals and their processing.

“Let It Be Morning,” a new film based on the 2006 novel by Sayed Kashua, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences, will compete at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

New research sheds light on how — and in what context — peacekeepers can contain the spread of violence in fragile post-conflict areas.

Biologists discovered that E. coli bacteria have a strategy that may help them to survive in between meals. The new research from the laboratory of Petra Levin in Arts & Sciences is published in PNAS.

Poets & Writers has awarded the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize to Carl Phillips, professor of English in Arts & Sciences.

Garrett King, a graduate student in the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration.

A study with Australian reptiles establishes a new return-on-investment method of determining species that are a priority for taxonomic research: undescribed species that are likely already threatened.