Arts & Sciences

If you happened to be in New York City last weekend, perhaps you saw a Times Square billboard promoting a very WashU pastime: Student Life Games. There, smiling from the 55-by-31-foot digital display, were crossword creators and founders of the newspaper’s games page, recent graduate Alex Nickel and sophomore Rena Cohen. 

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present staged readings of four new student plays as part of the 2025 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival.

The adzuki bean — a staple crop prominent in various East Asian cuisines — has been cultivated in the region for more than 8,000 years, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Shandong University in China have discovered.

WashU’s Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce will serve as series editors for the new book series “Thinking With James Baldwin.”

Data scientists at Washington University in St. Louis used new statistical tools to find that the association between lead exposure and academic test scores may be even stronger than previously suspected.

As director of the Digital Art History Lab, Betha Whitlow provides work experiences to students that are both fruitful and fairly compensated. She wants the same for her WashU colleagues. On the Danforth Staff Council, she successfully advocated for parental leave. 

In July, NASA formally designated WashU’s Geosciences Node, a division of NASA’s Planetary Data System that has been on campus since 1989, to serve as the lead science data node for the Artemis II, III and IV missions.

Joe Loewenstein, a professor of English​ and director of the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, all in Arts & Sciences, will serve as co-principal investigator for a $798,000 Human Networks and Data Science grant from the National Science Foundation.

With National Science Foundation support, physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have created quantum sensors that track stress and magnetism at pressures exceeding 30,000 times Earth’s atmosphere.

A researcher at Washington University in St. Louis is working to harness artificial intelligence to find psychological traits hidden in language.