Arts & Sciences

The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has some news to trumpet. Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music and composer of contemporary classical music, has two notable performances coming up this summer, and student Kelly Stathis was accepted into the Atlantic Music Festival Composition Program.

Lecture-based learning can be challenging for students who have difficulties building mental models for the organization of new information, but providing them with diagrams and other supporting material in advance of the lecture can help them overcome these hurdles, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

What is it with cheating? Cheaters seem to have an immediate advantage over cooperators, but do they have an evolutionary advantage? A study published in Current Biology suggests the benefits of cheating change with its prevalence,in a population. Cheaters may succeed, for example, only when they are rare, and fail when they become so numerous they push out cooperators.

James “Ely” Shrauner, PhD, a theoretical particle physicist and professor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, died from complications of Parkinson’s disease Monday, June 1, 2015, in Chesterfield, Mo. He was 82.

Gary Patti, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been recognized with a 2015 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for his contributions to metabolomics at the bench and in the classroom.

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​Washington University staff and faculty have one more month to join the 5,000 employees who already have contributed to Our Washington, the faculty and staff component of Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University. Donations support scholarships, strengthen academic and scientific initiatives, advance learning and enhance facilities.

A Washington University earthquake seismologist who is teaching a course on natural disasters in movies reviews the newly released film “San Andreas.” The short version: they clearly didn’t have a seismologist consulting on this film. The take home message: Go see it anyway. It’s summer.

Zohar Nussinov, PhD, associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a three-year, $279,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for research titled “Theoretical Approaches to Multi-Scale Complex Systems.”

Max Forrester, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a research travel grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.