Arts & Sciences

Gary J. Patti, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a 2017 Agilent Early Career Professor Award. The honor includes a $100,000 research award and is given to those who have made “significant original research contributions” and have “outstanding potential for future research.”

Communicating well across different cultures, backgrounds and experiences is an important skill. Here, experts from across campus give tips on how to navigate these sometimes fraught conversations.

Why does biodiversity grade from exuberance at the equator through moderation at mid-latitudes toward monotony at higher ones? Data from an international network of long-term forest dynamics research sites is finally providing an answer.

Just as people endlessly calculate how to upsize or downsize, bacteria continually adjust their volume (their stuff) to fit inside their membrane (their space). But what limits their expansion? The answer will surprise you.

Two graduates of the Washington University in St. Louis Class of 2017 — Carl Stanley Hooks and Kenneth Sng — have been named Yenching Scholars at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing. The two will complete a fully funded one-year residency at the Yenching Academy, where they will pursue master’s degrees in China studies.

Most organisms share the biosynthetic pathways for making crucial nutrients because it is is dangerous to tinker with them. But now a collaborative team of scientists has caught plants in the process of altering where and how cells make an essential amino acid.

NASA’s senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is examining rocks at the edge of Endeavour Crater for signs that they may have been either transported by a flood or eroded in place by wind.

Recent university alumna Emma Riley is a proud graduate of Clayton High School, but her perceptions of her hometown changed after she started studying Clayton’s history. Her documentary, “Displaced & Erased,” explores how city leaders zoned Clayton’s once-thriving black neighborhood out of existence to expand the central business district.

It’s easy to make up a story to explain an evolved trait; proving that’s what happened is much harder. Here scientists test ideas about cooperative breeding in birds and find a solution that resolves earlier disagreements.

Through her blog, Scary Mommy, and two parenting books, best-selling author Jill Smokler (right), BFA ’99, takes a look at parenting in all its irritating, sleepless, joyful and hilarious glory.