Arts & Sciences

World-renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones will receive Washington University’s 2016-17 International Humanities Prize Sept. 29. In this Q&A, Joanna Dee Das, assistant professor of dance, talks with Jones about his career, his choreographic process and his latest works.

In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, proclaimed to fellow Puritan settlers that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” In this video, Abram Van Engen examines the surprising history of Winthrop’s striking image and its subsequent adoption by presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

A billion years ago, the core of what was to become North America nearly ripped apart, creating a huge branched scar that extends from the tip of Lake Superior deep into the Midwest. Washington University in St. Louis scientists are using data from seismometers they placed across and along the rift to take a good hard look.

Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger III, an internationally recognized scholar of human memory and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, has received the the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has added a newly formed collaboration between Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania to its list of Science and Technology Centers (STC). The new center, one of just 12 nationally, will be supported by a $23.6 million NSF grant to study the mechanics of plant and animal cells. This deeper dive into how single cells function could transform both medicine and plant science.

Elizabeth Haswell, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was named a Faculty Scholar by a trio of major philanthropies Sept. 22.

The winners of the annual Dean James E. McLeod Writing Prize are Adon Wade-Currie and Olivia Crow, who shared first prize, and Emily Wyland, who received an honorable mention, announced Jennifer Smith, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

On Sept. 19, Washington University scientist Henric Krawczynski, announced that the X-Calibur X-ray telescope had landed safely near the border between Arizona and New Mexico, completing a long stratospheric balloon flight with disks full of data about neutron stars and black holes.

What gives Mordor Macula, the red dusted polar region of Pluto’s moon Charon, its color? New Horizons scientists, including Washington University’s Bill McKinnon, answer the question in the current issue of Nature.

Liviu Mirica, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the American Chemical Society’s St. Louis Section’s 2016 Saint Louis Award.