Arts & Sciences

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.

Did domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years? Genetic studies often indicate that domestication traits have a fairly simple genetic basis, which should facilitate their rapid evolution under selection. On the other hand, recent archeological studies of crop domestication have suggested a relatively slow spread and fixation of domestication traits. An article in “The Modern View of Domestication,” a special issue of PNAS, tries to resolve the discrepancy.

Alex Tinianow will receive this year’s Harrison D. Stalker Award from the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. The award is given annually to a graduating biology major whose undergraduate career combines outstanding scientific scholarship with significant contributions in the arts and humanities.

William F. Tate, PhD, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Department of Education at Washington University, has been named the next dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and vice provost for graduate education.

Groundbreaking neuroscientist Richard Davidson visited campus for two days of lectures, discussing the emotional life of the brain and how well-being can be learned.

Alumna Laura E. Knights has always been driven to help people and serve her community, a lesson instilled first by her parents and reinforced at Washington University, where Knights was an Ervin Scholar and counted the late Dean James E. McLeod among her mentors.