Arts & Sciences

Ram V. Dixit, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a four-year, $1.17 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research titled “Mechanisms for the Function and Regulation of Katanin.”

On a frosty winter’s night in 1909, five members of the Yale Glee Club convened at Mory’s Temple Bar to escape the New Haven cold. Thus was born the world’s oldest and best-known collegiate a cappella group. On Monday, April 27, the Whiffenpoofs will descend on Washington University in St. Louis for a puckish evening of traditional and popular song.

The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will honor professor emeritus Harold Blumenfeld, who died last fall at he age of 91, with a Memorial Concert in Graham Chapel April 19. The performance will feature Blumenfeld’s settings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Arthur Rimbaud as well as works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Paul Hindemith and Franz Schubert.

Lee Epstein, PhD, was installed as the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis in a campus ceremony March 17.

Odis Johnson, PhD, joined the Department of Education in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis this semester. Here, he talks about the future of education research and policy, and how education, race and urban policy intersect.

An inaugural exhibit of images by scientists, titled “Research as Art,” held April 3, included eerie landscapes created by vortices in superfluids, smeared false-color data from satellite-borne instruments, three-dimensional images of grains that exploded out of supernovas and many more enigmatic and colorful images.

The method is strange at first, disconcerting, but new rules and rhythms are quickly internalized. Soon the machines seem almost to speak. In “Telegraph,” recent alumnus Will Jacobs — winner of the 2014 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition at Washington University in St. Louis — explores the wonder and shortcomings of communication technology.

Kevin Hays, a junior at Washington University in St. Louis and a Rubik’s Cube champion, will attempt to break a Guinness World Record at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 19, at the annual Thurtene Carnival, the nation’s oldest and largest student-run carnival. Hays, from the bottom of a see-through dunk tank, will attempt to break the world record for most Rubik’s Cubes solved underwater. Thurtene Carnival runs from April 17-19 on Brookings Drive on the Danforth Campus.

Roger J. Phillips, PhD, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and director emeritus of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, April 15, at Washington University in St. Louis. The lecture, titled “No Denying Climate Change on Mars,” will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 100 of Whitaker Hall.

Seth Carlin, professor of music and head of the piano program in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected as an audition judge for the 69th annual auditions of the Artist Presentation Society.