Arts & Sciences

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.

Himadri B. Pakrasi, PhD, received a $49,448 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the “Indo-U.S. Workshop on Synthetic and Systems Biology” being held this November in New Delhi. Pakrasi is the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor and director of the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES).

Washington University in St. Louis alumnus W. E. Moerner, PhD, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Moerner shares the award, announced Oct. 8 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with Eric Betzig, PhD, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Stefan W. Hell, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, in Germany. The trio received the award for developing super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.​

​Ben Weiner, a 2003 Washington University in St. Louis alum, connects Nicaraguan coffee growers and roasters through his social enterprise Gold Mountain Coffee Growers. ​The result: a better cup of coffee, like the new Wash U Blend, and better pay for producers.

Pity the poor bassoon — large and awkward, often consigned to comic roles, its warm, mellow harmonics overshadowed by the thunder and lightening of piano and violin. But on Oct. 13, St. Louis Symphony bassoonist Andrew Gott and the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra will showcase the bassoon in all its expressive potential.