Arts & Sciences

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.

You know the voice but do you know the dance moves? On Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 1 and 2, Ira Glass, host and executive producer of “This American Life,” will join Monica Bill Barnes & Company for “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host” at Edison Theatre.

Gregory Knese, PhD, assistant professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a $138,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project “Harmonic Analysis and Spaces of Analytic Functions in Several Variables.”

Pharmaceutical companies have largely abandoned the business of discovering and developing antibiotics and our stock of these “miracle drugs” is beginning to shrink. Michael Kinch and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis are working to create new models for drug discovery that could replace the failed private enterprise model.