Arts & Sciences

Diversity plays a key role in maintaining the stability of plant and animal life in an area. But it’s difficult to scale up smaller experiments to understand how changes will impact larger ecosystems. A new study of North American birds from biologists in Arts & Sciences reveals the importance of both total numbers and variation in species identities.

Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that it is time to put away uncompromising and extreme rhetoric and truly listen to one another to find solutions that honor both the sanctity of life and a woman’s right to choose. 

Stan Braude, a biologist in Arts & Sciences, published a new study in the African Journal of Ecology that considers the role of the moon in driving a particularly rare occurrence: the solo journey of a naked mole rat from one underground colony to start a new one.

David Cunningham, chair of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and a nationally recognized expert on white supremacist groups, says that under the Trump administration, white supremacists feel a new license to act. The latest data from the Southern Poverty Law Center show a sharp increase in hate incidents since 2016.

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.

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.

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.

The divide between urban and rural voters in the United States is nothing new, but its cause has been less clear. A new study by Washington University in St. Louis political scientists finds that it isn’t personal profiles, but rather proximity to bigger cities that drives the political divide.

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.

Alec Becker, a first-year student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died by suicide Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, in his hometown of Dallas. He was 18. Becker only attended Washington University for the fall semester, but friends and faculty who had the opportunity to know Becker say he was thoughtful, warm and spirited.