Arts & Sciences

Arpita Bose, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a Packard Fellow, a prestigious distinction awarded to only 18 top young researchers nationwide this year. Bose plans to use the grant to work with unusual microbes that can take electrons directly from an outside source to draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide or make sustainable biofuels.

Andrew Flachs, a sociocultural anthropology graduate student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded the Political Ecology Society Eric Wolf Prize for the best article-length paper based in substantive field research that makes an innovative contribution to political ecology.

Mike Dyer, supervisor of the greenhouse on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, has the job many of us probably wish we had —  but only because we think he spends the day pottering around watering plants. Instead, his job requires everything from the mechanical and engineering skills needed to suppress the greenhouse’s voracious appetite for energy; extensive knowledge of insects; and the ability to grow any plant he is handed under the conditions specified. It’s not exactly relaxing, but he enjoys it that way.

Gerhild Scholz Williams explores the vast legal, scientific and theological literature known as demonology, which helped established “the image of the witch as a night-flying, sexually voracious creature.”

New research shows that an ancient protein that protects bacteria from bursting also helps pollen survive the dangerous transition from desiccated to hydrated once it lands on the female flower. But in pollen’s case, the protein has evolved to provide just the right amount of internal pressure: enough to power cell growth but not so much that the pollen bursts and dies.

Nobel laureate and Washington University in St. Louis alumnus William E. Moerner, PhD, will present the Weissman Lecture “Fun with Light and Single Molecules Opens Up an Amazing New View Inside Cells” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in Louderman Hall on the Danforth Campus. The lecture describes the surprising techniques he and other chemists developed for imaging individual molecules, techniques that won him the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

Falling back is easier on us than springing forward, says Erik Herzog, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has devoted his career to studying body clocks and circadian rhythms. But it is never a good idea to force our body clocks to follow abrupt changes in mechanical clocks. We should get rid of daylight savings time, Herzog says.

The way our brains are wired may reveal a lot about us, according to new research co-authored by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis. For example, people with “positive” behavioral traits, such as sharp memories, many years of education and robust physical endurance, have stronger neural connections between certain brain regions than people with “negative” traits, such as smoking, aggressive behavior and a family history of alcohol abuse.

In this Q&A, program founders Rebecca Messbarger and Corinna Treitel discuss the new minor in medical humanities, the development of the field and the relationship between the arts and sciences.

The Experimental Psychology Division (Division 3) of the American Psychological Association (APA) has awarded its 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award to Larry L. Jacoby, PhD, an internationally recognized scholar of human memory and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.