Arts & Sciences

Piano prodigy, social activist, folksinger and chart-topping recording artist — Judy Collins has done it all. This fall, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” will launch WUSTL’s 2013-14 Edison Ovations Series. Featuring almost a dozen events by nationally and internationally known artists, the season will range from athletic contemporary dance and incisive one-man shows to hip-hop violin and the world’s first live-action graphic novel.

Ovations 2013-14

On their recent album You’re Everything, jazz vocalist Feyza Eren and drummer Steve Davis swing through a range of jazz and pop standards. On July 11, the pair will launch WUSTL’s Jazz in July series with a free concert in Holmes Lounge.

Leslie Heusted, director of the Danforth University Center & Event Management Office, sits down to discuss students, nerf guns and the structured aimlessness of afternoon tea.

WUSTL biologist Alan Templeton and colleagues in Israel and Germany received $2 million to look at the shifting patterns of gene expression, called the transcriptome, in two remarkably versatile species of fire salamander, one native to Israel and the other to Germany. The work may explain why this genus of salamanders is able to adapt to a wide variety of habitats when most salamander species live in one.

Washington University in St. Louis is one of eight Association of American Universities (AAU) member campuses selected to serve as project sites for the association’s five-year initiative to improve the quality of undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields at its member institutions, AAU officials announced today.

2013 WUSTL graduate and volleyball player Marilee Fisher has made the initital list of contenders for the 2013 NCAA Woman of the Year Award, the NCAA recently announced. Fisher, who majored in chemistry, in Arts & Sciences, is one of 455 student-athletes across all NCAA divisions and sports vying for the award.

Mary-Dell Chilton, PhD, who did pioneering work on plant genetics while on the biology faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has been named a co-recipient of the 2013 World Food Prize, an honor often described as the “Nobel Prize of Biotechnology.”

Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, has been appointed chair of an advisory group that will lead the National Academy of Sciences’ new Gulf of Mexico program, established as part of settlements with British Petroleum and Transocean Ltd. following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. The advisory group will help create a strategic vision and guide the program’s development and implementation.

Student Anastasia Sorokina lived in Japan as a small child and always wanted to return. Next year, she’ll get the chance, after being awarded a Boren scholarship. Sorokina just completed her sophomore year at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is double-majoring in comparative arts and international studies, both in Arts & Sciences. Boren scholarships allow U.S. students to study abroad in parts of the world critical to U.S. interests.