Arts & Sciences

As a prequel to the World Cup this summer, University College and the Summer School, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, are sponsoring a panel discussion May 5 titled “Is The USA Becoming a Soccer Country?”

The Green Machine designed by undergraduates at Washington University in St. Louis won the People’s Choice, second place and Best Single Step awards at the 2014 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. The national competition was held at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, earlier in April. Several of the students were also on the team that won first place last year.

“Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning” offers students of all ages a clear and compelling primer on the best and worst ways to store and retrieve new knowledge. The book is co-authored by psychologists Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, leading experts on human learning and memory at Washington University in St. Louis, along with nonfiction writer and novelist Peter C. Brown. 

A recent interdisciplinary conference that led to the publication of a special issue of PNAS on domestication raised more questions than it answered. Washington University in St. Louis scientists Fiona Marshall and Ken Olsen, who participated in the conference and contributed to the special issue, discuss some of the key questions that have been raised about this pivotal event in human history.

Fiona Marshall, PhD, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, was one of seven faculty members to receive the Graduate Student Senate’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award during an April 9 ceremony in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton has announced the creation of new four-year fellowships in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, made possible by a generous gift from William H. Danforth. Danforth hopes the new fellowships will attract highly motivated students to this field of study and foster a culture of intellectual entrepreneurship focused on research and innovation in plant sciences.

At a recent WUSTL Board of Trustees meeting, several faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure.

Steven Fazzari, PhD, will be installed as the Bert A. and Jeanette L. Lynch Distinguished Professor in a ceremony on Monday, April 21. He is the first  to receive this distinction in the Department of Economics, thanks to the generosity of the Lynches, who have provided for a total of three new professorships. The other two are named in honor of Douglass C. North, PhD, and the late Murray L. Weidenbaum, PhD.; these appointments will be made at a future date.

Joseph Loewenstein, PhD, director of the Humanities Digital Workshop, is leading a vertical seminar for faculty, staff and graduate students in the digital humanities. The burgeoning field gives scholars new methods to analyze literature and history and encourages a new kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

WUSTL senior Alaina Smith works as a court advocate with the St. Louis County Domestic Violence Court and as a facilitator at RAVEN, a batterer intervention program. Smith is among this year’s Gerry and Bob Virgil Ethic of Service Award winners.