Arts & Sciences

The Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series turned 60 in 2013, and to mark such an august occasion, it’s fitting to remember why the lecture series was conceived in the first place. The Assembly Series launched during the institution’s centennial celebration in 1953 as a way to involve the broader St. Louis community in the robust intellectual life on campus.

Robyn S. Hadley, founder and executive director of the “What’s After High School” program in Burlington, N.C., has been named associate vice chancellor and director of the prestigious John B. Ervin Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Biologist Joan E. Strassmann, PhD, was installed Jan. 23 as the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences in a ceremony in Holmes Lounge. Following the formal installation, Strassmann gave an entertaining talk about a high-stakes gamble she and Queller made 15 years ago: to switch from studying cooperation and conflict in social insects, famous for their complex societal arrangements, to studying it in an amoeba, whose claim to fame had been its simple lifestyle.

The WUSTL Assembly Series turned 60 in 2013, and to mark the anniversary, we revisit why the lecture series was conceived in the first place. The Assembly Series launched during the institution’s centennial celebration in 1953 as a way to involve the broader St. Louis community in the robust intellectual life on campus.

Happiness will be the focus of Washington University’s Master of Liberal Arts Saturday Lecture Series that runs throughout February. Free and open to the public, the series is sponsored by University College, the professional and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences. All talks are set for 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in January Hall, Room 110, on the Danforth Campus.

Along the Missouri River between St. Louis and Hermann, a restored German settlement, is an enchanted valley blessed by low-density land use where people grow North American grapes for Missouri wine, groundcover in interlocking trays for green roofs, vegetables for St. Louis locivore restaurants and native trees for environmentally conscious landscapers. WUSTL readers will recognize many of the contributers to Missouri River Country, a book that celebrates this land and the people who have lived there. All proceeds from the book’s sales will go to land conservation.

WUSTL’s Institute for School Partnership is committed to evolution education as part of a sound K-12 science curriculum, and it kicks off its second annual Darwin Day celebration Friday and Saturday, Feb. 7 and 8, with workshops for teachers and students. Darwin Day is celebrated internationally on or around Feb. 12, Darwin’s birthday, as a celebration of science and humanity. Highlighting the weekend on the WUSTL campus: a visit from alum Sean B. Carroll, PhD, vice president for science education at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Stories are nice. So are songs. But put them together and you have cabaret, a distinctively intimate artform that collapses the distance — both figuratively and literally — between performer and audience. On Feb. 12, the husband-and-wife team of Todd and Kelly Daniel Decker will present “Songs from Broadway and Hollywood” as part of the DUC Chamber Music Series.

Ten years ago, on Jan. 24, 2004, the Opportunity rover landed on a flat plain in the southern highlands of the planet Mars and rolled into an impact crater scientists didn’t even know existed. In honor of the rover’s 10th anniversary, Ray Arvidson, PhD, deputy principal investigator of the rover mission, recently took an audience on a whirlwind tour of the rover’s decade-long adventures and discoveries.

In the Jan. 24 edition of the journal Science, Ray Arvidson, PhD, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and deputy principal investigator of the MER mission to Mars, writes in detail about the discoveries made by the Opportunity rover and how these discoveries have shaped our knowledge of the planet.