Arts & Sciences

Sarah Elgin, PhD, Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts & Sciences, has received a $625,046 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Effective Implementation of a Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE): Testing, Optimizing and Extending a Bioinformatics Project.”

This August, a consortium of 65 scientists announced in the journal Science that they have so far found seven probable but not confirmed interstellar dust specks in a collector returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. Undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis found three of the seven specks of dust.

They’ve shrunken Shakespeare, condensed Christmas, abbreviated the Bible and pruned and pared great works of poetry and prose. At 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14, at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, The Reduced Shakespeare Company will tackle the subject it was born to abridge: “The Complete History of Comedy.”

​Known to generations of Washington University students and faculty members as “Sam and Betty,” Sam Lachterman and Betty Wynn, a homeless brother-and-sister who spent decades attending programs on campus, bequeathed $54,000 to Washington University. Half of their gift will fund the Nov. 1-2 performances of an Assembly Series event chosen just for them, “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host” at Edison Theatre. The other half will live on in bequests to the School of Law, the Kemper Museum and Arts & Sciences.

​Overwhelmed by speculators trying to cash-in on a prized medicinal fungus known as Himalayan Viagra, two isolated Tibetan communities have managed to do at the local level what world leaders often fail to do on a global scale — implement a successful system for the sustainable harvest of a precious natural resource, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.​

Adam Schefkind, a biology major in Arts & Sciences with minors in public and jazz studies, says his two passions – medicine and music – both demand precision and creativity. Schefkind and his band will perform at Jazz at Holmes at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30. He is the first student to headline the venerable jazz series, according to his mentor William Lenihan, professor of the practice in music and director of jazz performance.

The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) was spotted in Houston in 1985 but can now be found in all of the southern states and as far north as Maine. To reconstruct its spread, scientists turned to the new discipline of landscape genetics. Correlating genetic patterns with landscape patterns, they concluded that the mosquito had hitched a ride along highways. One of only a handful of landscape genetics studies to track an invasive species, this is the first to detect hitchhiking.

Adrienne Strong, a graduate student studying in sociocultural anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received Fulbright-Hays-Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program funding.

The Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellowship Program for Women in Graduate Studies is celebrating its 40 years on Washington University’s campus during the 40th annual Olin Fellowship Conference, “How Climates Change,” Oct. 30-31. Jane Lubchenco, PhD, the first woman to head the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, will give the keynote address at 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 31, in Graham Chapel.

For Mark Rollins, PhD, professor of philosophy and chair of the Performing Arts Department (PAD), both in Arts & Sciences, a guiding principle throughout his distinguished career at Washington University in St. Louis has been making connections in the search for answers. This principle has proved useful in his administrative work for the university and as an educator and researcher whose focus is on making connections between science and art.