Arts & Sciences

Amanda Scott, a doctoral candidate in history in Arts & Sciences, is one of 20 winners of the 2016 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. The $25,000 award is among the nation’s most prestigious for doctoral candidates in the humanities and social sciences, with a specific emphasis on questions concerning ethical and religious values.

Scientists find gravity very puzzling. For one thing, they don’t understand why it is so weak; that is, why it takes so much stuff (like a planet’s worth) to generate much gravitational force. Perhaps, they say, it is leaking out of our universe. Physicist Adam Archibald, MA ’14, explains how this could be and describes an […]

Glaciations on Mars are different from those on Earth. During a Martian glacial period, water vapor that would otherwise travel to the north polar cap instead snows out at lower latitudes, where ice then accumulates. Radargrams of the north polar region of Mars record the most recent mid-latitude Martian glacial period and the regrowth of the polar ice since then.

Paul Michael Lützeler, the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, has received the Award for International Exchange from the American Alumni Association of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

The research team of Liviu Mirica, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, has developed novel methods for generating the buildings blocks of important compounds with the common metal nickel. The work expands scientists’ toolbox for nickel-based chemistry, and contributes to the movement of “green chemistry” toward a 21st century of sustainable synthesis.

Xuan Cindy Li, a student majoring in biochemistry and in women, gender and sexuality studies, both in Arts & Sciences, was selected as a 2016 intern for the Civil Liberties & Public Policy program at Hampshire College’s summer program, the Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps.

Washington University in St. Louis will welcome three of the brightest stars in the classical firmament — Jonathan Biss, Yefim Bronfman and Nathan Gunn — to the 560 Music Center as part of its new Great Artist Series.

Deanna Barch, chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, is the 2016 recipient of the mentor award from the Academic Women’s Network at Washington University.

Using computer models, New Horizons team members have been able to determine the depth of the layer of solid nitrogen ice within Pluto’s distinctive “heart” feature — a large plain informally known as Sputnik Planum — and how fast that ice is flowing. “For the first time, we can really determine what these strange welts of the icy surface of Pluto really are,” said William B. McKinnon, who led the study.

Washington University in St. Louis is one of 10 American higher education institutions chosen to host the EducationUSA Academy this summer. The initiative, sponsored by the State Department and its cooperative partner, World Learning, provides an immersive environment designed to prepare high school students from around the globe who aspire to attend an American college or university.