Arts & Sciences

In the 1970s and ’80s, the St. Louis band Tracer was one of the area’s premiere exponents of fusion-style jazz. On Thursday, Sept. 11, the re-formed Tracer will launch Jazz at Holmes Series. The annual fall series also will include tributes to John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Gaslight Square.

John G. Baugh, PhD, the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of 10 distinguished scholars to be honored as 2015 fellows of the Linguistic Society of America.   

It can be plain or embroidered, a single hue or richly patterned, a bold statement or a humble custom. In “Unveiled,” Chicago-based playwright Rohina Malik explores the significance of the traditional Muslim hijab through the lives of five contemporary women who choose to wear it for the Edison Ovations Series at Washington University Saturday, Sept. 27.

Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has announced that he will step down as dean at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2015. After a yearlong sabbatical beginning in July 2015, Quatrano will resume his position as the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

Jean Sutherland Boggs, the first woman appointed to full professorship in the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Friday, Aug. 22, 2014. She was 92.

Rebecca Treiman, PhD, the Burke & Elizabeth High Baker Professor of Child Developmental Psychology in Arts & Sciences, received the 2014 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading’s Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, given every two years for outstanding contributions to the field.

Washington University’s Global Health Center selected five ​WUSTL students for its inaugural summer research program, which paired students with faculty mentors to explore issues such as malnutrition, maternal health and access to health care. Pictured is program participant Laura Bliss, a second-year medical student.

In a few days, a balloon-borne telescope sensitive to the polarization of high-energy “hard” X rays will ascend to the edge of the atmosphere above Fort Sumner, N.M., to stare fixedly at black holes and other exotic astronomical objects. It will be carried aloft by a stratospheric balloon that will expand to a sphere large enough to hold a 747 jetliner the float height of 120,000 feet, three times the height at which commercial aircraft fly and on the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Launching the balloon is not child’s play.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have obtained the first experimental evidence that there are at least two fail-safe points in the bacterial cell cycle. If the fail-safes are activated, the cell is forced to exit the cell cycle forever. It then enters a zombie-like state and is unable to reproduce even under the most favorable of conditions. Drugs that trigger the fail-safes are already under development.

In the Aug. 28 issue of the journal Nature, a multi-institution research network called modENCODE (the Model Organism ENCylopedia Of DNA Elements) published three major papers that map and compare the genomes and epigenomes of humans and two model organisms, the fly, D. melanogaster, and the worm, C. elegans, in unprecedented detail. The fly and worm could serve as model organisms for screening drugs and micronutrients that might alter the epigenome, which is implicated in many diseases.