Arts & Sciences

Chancellor Andrew D. Martin and Interim Provost Marion Crain have appointed a 16-member committee to identify candidates for the position of dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences. Aaron F. Bobick, dean of the McKelvey School of Engineering, will chair the search committee.

Ethically sourced and informed by archaeology, an ambitious new study reports genome-wide DNA information from 523 ancient humans collected at archaeological sites across the Near East and Central and South Asia. Washington University in St. Louis brought key partners together to generate the world’s largest study of ancient DNA, published this week in the journal Science.

Arts & Sciences presented Outstanding Staff Awards to Robert Chien, Rachel Dunaway and Sue McKinney and the Dean’s Award to Henry S. Webber in recognition of their extraordinary contributions to the effectiveness of teaching, advising, counseling and research in Arts & Sciences.

Black St. Louisans are exposed to considerably greater environmental risks than white residents, contributing to stark racial disparities regarding health, economic, and quality of life burdens, finds a new report prepared by the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic (IEC) at Washington University School of Law.

Anthropologist T.R. Kidder in Arts & Sciences contributed to one of the first “big data” studies in archaeology to tackle broader questions of how humans have reshaped landscapes, ecosystems and potentially climate over millennia. The analysis published Aug. 30 in the journal Science challenges conventional ideas that man’s impact has been “mostly recent.”

The Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM) has been established at Washington University in St. Louis, thanks to a $500,559 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to Odis Johnson, professor of sociology and of education, both in Arts & Sciences. The grant is designed to mitigate the disparities in the number of underrepresented scholars that utilize quantitative and computational research methods and techniques.

A global study comparing 2,062 birds finds that, in highly variable environments, birds tend to have either larger or smaller brains relative to their body size. New research from Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, finds birds with smaller brains tend to use ecological strategies that are not available to big-brained counterparts.

New Arts & Sciences research from Washington University in St. Louis shows that invasive mosquitoes at the northern limit of their current range are surviving conditions that are colder than those in their native territory. This new evidence of rapid local adaptation could have implications for efforts to control the spread of this invasive species.

Keshav Sanghani, a rising sophomore in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died June 30, 2019. He was 19. Sanghani, of Willowbrook, Ill., was an accomplished student who was interested in math, economics and languages.

Senior Chibueze Agwu, a philosophy-neuroscience-psychology major in Arts & Sciences and a residential advisor, gave the student address to the Class of 2023 at Convocation. Read his remarks.