Arts & Sciences

H. Holden Thorp, PhD (left), provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, was installated by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton as the inaugural holder of the Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professorship during a ceremony held Oct. 14 in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium. Thorp’s installation address was titled “Back to the Future: Accomplishment and Aspiration at Washington University.” 

Climate change, water shortages and the loss of farmland to pollution and urban sprawl are making it increasingly difficult for farmers to feed the world’s growing population, agricultural scholars from four continents said this week at an international symposium held at Washington University in St. Louis.

The government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, Indian corporate leaders and Washington University in St. Louis have invested $2.5 million to launch the Indo-U.S. Advanced Bioenergy Consortium for Second Generation Biofuels (IUABC). The goal of the center is to increase biomass yield in plants and algae, enabling downstream commercial development for cost-effective, efficient and environmentally sustainable production of advanced biofuels.

Why do works of art move us so powerfully? Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, MD,will share his insight as the Arthur Holly Compton Lecturer for the Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 28, in Graham Chapel.

Josiah Lewis, a graduate student in physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship for 2014–15. The fellowship is for research titled “Atom-Probe Studies of the Origins of Meteoritic Nanodiamonds and Silicon Carbide.”

Clarinetist Nicolas del Grazia and St. Louis Symphony violinist Jooyeon Kong will join Washington University in St. Louis pianist Seth Carlin for works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Schumann, Sergey Prokofiev and Igor Stravinksky Oct. 26.

The topic of the 2014 Robert M. Walker Distinguished Lecture the evening of Oct. 23 will be black holes. The speaker is Ramesh Narayan, a Harvard astrophysicist who has studied the event horizon and the spin of these celestial enigmas. The talk, which starts at 7 p. m. in Whitaker Hall on the Danforth Campus, is free and open to the public.

The problems of racism in America have deep roots. That’s what literary critic and biographer Christoph Irmscher, PhD, will remind the Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27. Irmscher’s lecture,”Talking About Race in 19th-Century American Science: Louis Agassiz and His Contemporaries,” is the annual Thomas Hall Lecture in the History of Science. It is free and open to the public and will be held in Rebstock Hall, Room 210, on the university’s Danforth Campus.

More than 170 undergraduate students showcased their research projects through poster and oral presentations at the fall Undergraduate Research Symposium, held Oct. 11 in Olin Library. Arts & Sciences sophomore (far right) Jesse Kao explains his research to Ari Gao, a fellow sophomore and presenter, at the event designed to give students experience discussing their research projects with a wide audience while honing their presentation and communication skills. 

Stephen Prothero, PhD, professor of religion at Boston University and author of numerous books, will explore America’s cultural rifts from a historic perspective for the Assembly Series. The program, free and open to the public, will begin at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium. His presentation, “Why Liberals Win: America’s Culture Wars from the Election of 1800 to Same-Sex Marriage,” is a Danforth Distinguished Lecture, sponsored by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.