Arts & Sciences

The Graduate Student Senate recognized eight faculty with Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards during its 14th annual awards ceremony, held April 10 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. Six other faculty received special recognition for excellence in mentoring.

The first-ever Dean James E. McLeod Freshman Writing Prize has been awarded, and the inaugural winners are Senit Kidane and Claudia Vaughan. McLeod was a longtime WUSTL leader who died in 2011. The Center for the Humanities provided funding for the contest, and any freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences could submit work for consideration. Original research papers exploring an aspect of race, gender or identity and created for a freshman course were eligible.

In Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, three undergraduate students—the inaugural Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellows—explore the hopes, illusions and realities of China in the Reform Era.

​The 18th annual Summer Writers Institute will be held on Washington University’s Danforth Campus this July, giving writers of varying experience levels the opportunity to join a diverse and energetic writing community. Evening sessions this year meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday instead of Monday through Friday. Also, the weekend sessions will be afternoons only instead of daylong seminars. The institute begins Friday, July 12, and runs through Friday, July 26.​

Scientists working at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered two tiny grains of silica (SiO2; the most common constituent of sand) in meteorites that fell to earth in Antarctica. Because of their isotopic composition these two grains are thought to be pure samples from a massive star that exploded before the birth of the solar system, perhaps the supernova whose explosion is thought to have triggered the collapse of a giant molecular cloud, giving birth to the Sun.

Pre-K through 6th-grade students and their teachers at Cool Valley Elementary School were the lucky recipients of more than 350 books donated by education students in Washington University’s Kappa Delta Pi honor society. As part of KDP’s service project this year, they raised funds to purchase the children’s books, which they delivered to the school on April 12.

Lindsey Steinberg has been selected to receive the 2013 Sowden Prize, given each year by the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences. The prize, named in honor of the late John C. Sowden, a professor of chemistry  and a successful carbohydrate chemist, is the highest honor the Chemistry Department bestows on a graduating senior chemistry major.

Discovering ways to honor the dignity of individuals coping with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is the goal of an interdisciplinary symposium on “Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia” to be held in Wilson Hall on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St Louis on Saturday, April 27.

Gerald L. Early, PhD, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, delivered a talk during his induction ceremony into the St. Louis Walk of Fame April 11 on Delmar Boulevard in The Loop. To read the piece, click here.

Professor Gerald L. Early, PhD, an internationally renowned essayist and American culture critic, was recognized with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame during an April 11 induction ceremony in front of the Moonrise Hotel on Delmar Boulevard in The Loop. His brass star and a bronze plaque will be embedded at a later time near the corner of Delmar and Eastgate Avenue after construction is completed on the first phase of WUSTL’s Loop Student Living Initiative.