Arts & Sciences

Psychologist Kristina Olson, BA ’03, wins one of science’s most prestigious awards for her research on identity.

Pamela Meyer, BA ’80, is founder and CEO of Calibrate, a corporate training company that specializes in deception detection. She is author of the 2010 book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, and her 2011 Ted Talk, “How to Spot a Liar,” has more than 22 million views. Here she talks about deciphering deception.

Recently appointed to the university’s board of trustees, alumna Vicki Match Suna serves the university in numerous ways. She has particularly enjoyed being involved in the university’s recent capital project to transform the east end of the Danforth Campus.

Max Klapow is a William H. Danforth Scholar and research assistant in the Diversity Sciences Lab. The Class of 2021 Arts & Sciences student presented at TEDxWUSTL about radical empathy in April 2019.

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.