Arts & Sciences

Welcome back to Class Acts, a celebration of the Class of 2021. This week, we spotlight advocates Leah Wren Hardgrove, Logan Phillips and Alexis Tinoco, three seniors working to make a difference.

Municipalities such as University City play a vital role in protecting the planet, and Washington University students are working hard to help the city meet its sustainability goals.

Chancellor Andrew D. Martin and four other faculty members of Washington University were elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the academy announced April 22. The others are Deanna Barch, John Baugh, Pascal Boyer and Holden Thorp. Founded in 1780, the academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists and innovators.

Bobby, Jill and Tina gather around the picnic table. Their bickering drifts across Mudd Field. But fear not, this isn’t some end-of-year meltdown — it’s a live, un-miked, guerilla-style performance of George F. Walker’s provocative tragicomedy “Tough!”.

Black Americans experience an increase in poor mental health days during weeks when two or more incidents of anti-Black violence occur and when national interest surrounding the events is higher, according to new research involving a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University’s Prison Education Project has won a two-year, $980,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award resulted from the Mellon Foundation’s “Future of Higher Learning in Prison” competition.

Sometimes overshadowed by neighboring Amazon forests, the forests of the Andes Mountains are helping to protect the planet by acting as a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide and keeping some of this climate-altering gas out of circulation, according to biologists in Arts & Sciences and their partners from a Living Earth Collaborative working group.

Macy Sprunger, a graduate student in Meredith Jackrel’s lab in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won a three-year $136,560 National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Such fellowships support predoctoral students conducting research in scientific health-related fields.

Michael Nowak, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is co-author of a study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that shares unprecedented observations of the black hole in the galaxy M87.

John E. McCarthy, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics and chair of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, received a five-year $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop new tools to deal with complexity in the design of systems such as those used in automatic pilots and self-driving cars.