Arts & Sciences

Jonathan Bate, PhD, one of the world’s leading scholars of Shakespeare, will discuss “Shakespeare at 450 Years” at 2:30 p.m. Monday, April 7, in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis. Bate, who is well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar, is provost of Worcester College and professor of English literature at the University of Oxford.

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Bill McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, lists as his top research interests the icy satellites of the outer solar system and the physics of impact cratering. But he isn’t picky. If anything unusual and exciting is going on anywhere in the solar system, he wants to know about it.

Could a cup of coffee bring faculty across campus together to expand and enhance research and teaching while broadening perspectives? That’s the idea behind the Office of the Provost’s Bring Your Own Idea program, which awards grants to support gatherings of faculty from across Washington University in St. Louis around meaningful topics.

Diversity and Inclusion Grants totaling nearly $112,000 were awarded to 10 projects designed to strengthen and promote diversity on campus.

Five friends and WUSTL students document their studies and travels abroad — on five continents — through stories and photographs.

Washington University in St. Louis is re-establishing its sociology department after a nearly 25-year hiatus, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

Former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, of Maine, will have an informal conversation with Washington University in St. Louis students and faculty at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. The event is sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

The journal Icarus published a study this month that compared lunar crater counts by eight professionals with crowdsourced counts by volunteers. The professional crater counts varied by as much as a factor of two. Two of the professionals, both planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, explain why they weren’t surprised.

Plants fine-tune the response of their cells to the potent plant hormone auxin by means of large families of proteins that either step on the gas or put on the brake in auxin’s presence. Scientists at Washington University have learned that one of these proteins, a transcription factor, has an interaction region that, like a button magnet, has a positive and negative face. Because of this domain, the protein can bind two other proteins or even chains of proteins arranged back-to-front.