Arts & Sciences

Six faculty members from Washington University in St. Louis have won Emerson Excellence in Teaching awards.

Carl Bender, the Konneker Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has received a Humboldt Research Award. The award is given to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Federico Ardila, professor of mathematics at San Francisco State University, will deliver the Loeb Undergraduate Lecture in Mathematics, “Using geometry to move robots quickly,” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The Black Rep will present the world premiere of the drama “Canfield Drive” in Edison Theatre Jan. 9. The play, some four years in the making, runs through Jan. 27 and explores how two powerful journalists from very different ideological perspectives grapple with the 2014 death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

A Washington University in St. Louis interdisciplinary initiative has sparked a wave of faculty research and the publication of a new book examining the incidence of cancer among low-income women of color in St. Louis and the Metro East communities of Illinois, including East St. Louis.

Henry W. Berger, professor emeritus of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Dec. 10. He was 81.

Rebecca Lester, associate professor of sociocultural anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. She also was recently elected president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its X-Calibur instrument, a telescope that measures the polarization of X-rays arriving from distant neutron stars, black holes and other exotic celestial bodies, launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

There is no secret to happiness, but there is a science to it, says Tim Bono, a psychology lecturer in Arts & Sciences who teaches courses on happiness at  Washington University in St. Louis.

Margaret Garb, professor of history in Arts & Sciences and co-director of the Washington University Prison Education Project, died Dec. 15 after a long battle with cancer. She was 56.