Arts & Sciences

While many historians have explored the bitter court-ordered desegregation of public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, the equally dramatic story of the voluntary desegregation of prestigious, traditionally white, private schools remains largely untold. A new book, “Transforming The Elite,” sets out to fill that void by telling the firsthand stories of the young black students who broke the color barrier at the South’s most prestigious private schools in the fall of 1967.

Andrew Rehfeld, associate professor of political science at Washington University, has been elected the 13th president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) following a national search to fill the role.

A new breed of American farmers are being drawn to the field by factors such as higher education, personal politics, disenchantment with urban life and the search for an authentic rural identity, according to new research by anthropologists from Washington University.

Graduate student and McDonnell International Scholars Academy scholar Po-Cheng Lin delivered the winning presentation at the Three Minute Thesis competition, held at the McDonnell Academy’s 7th International Symposium in Beijing.

Gabbie Eyler won the People’s Choice Award in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Holiday Cookie Contest for her chocolate turtle cookies, a chocolate sugar cookie rolled in toasted pecans and drizzled with chocolate and caramel. It is the second straight year a senior has won a top prize in the annual contest. Eyler learned how to bake from her mother, Amy Eyler, associate professor of public health at the Brown School.

Brett Wick, professor of mathematics, and three other mathematicians from the U.S., France and Australia, received a Discovery Project award for their collaborative international project “Harmonic analysis: function spaces and partial differential equations.”

Jeffrey G. Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been appointed the next executive editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the official journal of Geochemical Society and the Meteoritical Society. His term will begin Jan. 1. 

Brian E. Blank, associate professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, died of heart failure Sunday, Dec. 9, 2018, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. He was 65.

Ten students are among representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Poland for COP24, the U.N. conference on climate change. This year’s meeting will focus on how to achieve climate goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

John E. McCarthy, chair and professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington University, was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. The society recognized McCarthy for his contributions to operator theory and functions of several complex variables.