Arts & Sciences

Whether tackling gun violence or connecting students to the community, Risa Zwerling Wrighton is dedicated to improving lives, making her the perfect first lady.

From the beginning of his tenure, Mark Wrighton set out to put Washington University and its students and faculty on the map.

Morgan DeBaun, AB ’12, and three other WashU alumni ­founded Blavity, a news and entertainment website featuring stories from a black point of view. Today, DeBaun is CEO, using the varied skills she learned at WashU.

Oguz Alyanak, an anthropology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences, has been selected for a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities to support his research on the social lives of working-class Muslim men in Germany, France and other European countries.

A book by Tim Bartley, professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences, has won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book from the International Studies Association’s Environmental Studies Section.

The Performing Arts Department presents the world premiere of “Florida,” a new play by recent alumnus Lucas Marschke, April 11-14 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre. Workshopped last fall as part of the A. E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival, the play recounts a dysfunctional vacation for the ages.

Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have figured out how to feed electricity to microbes to grow truly green, biodegradable plastic, as reported in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.

New research from Arts & Sciences suggests that many “redundant” enzymes are actually specialists that ensure maximal growth across different environments. They also seem to increase resistance to antibiotics in conditions like those in the GI tract or urinary tract — raising concerns that current antibiotic susceptibility tests are inadequate.

Marie Kondo herself couldn’t do it any better. Now researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have uncovered a previously unknown structural feature of living cells that is critical to tidying up.

Researchers led by Kenneth M. Olsen in Arts & Sciences used a new imaging technique to reveal a takeover strategy that has worked for weedy rice over and over again: roots that minimize below-ground contact with other plants.