Arts & Sciences

Many WUSTL students will be on hand at the St. Louis Science Center this Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. to explain the brain and their brain research to interested visitors. They are participants in NeuroDay, a free brain science expo featuring hands-on activities and demonstrations that provide a rare opportunity to learn about the human brain, the nervous system, neurological disorders and cutting-edge brain research.

The ability to access, search, and interact with legal case documents that record the freedom suits of former slaves is now just a browser click away, thanks to a major initiative of the Digital Library Services unit of Washington University Libraries. The Libraries secured funding for the project from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, with the Missouri History Museum as an institutional partner. (VIDEO)

Mike Hayes, WUSTL’s executive director of Campus Life, empowers student leaders and helps to foster “light bulb” moments.

A team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, headed by Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, unexpectedly found the mechanism by which tiny single molecules spontaneously grow into centimeter-long microtubes by leaving a dish for a different experiment in the refrigerator.  This novel approach of making nano- and microstructures and devices is expected to have numerous applications in electronics, optics and biomedical applications.

Brittni D. Jones, a PhD student in the Department of Education in Arts & Sciences, explains her research on geographic disparities in science achievement, to Ganesh M. Babulal, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ RAPS program, during the 18th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium, held Feb. 16. The symposium offers an opportunity for graduate and professional students to present their research to an audience of non-specialists and allows them to hone communication skills necessary for grant and proposal writing as well as job interviews.

Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

It’s hard to wave when your elbow can’t bend. In Beauty, choreographer Jane Comfort deploys the robotic, stiff-jointed movements of Barbie and Ken dolls to withering satirical effect. On Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, Jane Comfort and Company will perform Beauty—as well as the BESSIE Award-winning Underground River — as part of the Edison Ovations Series.

In the early 20th century, utopian conviction about the promise of artistic abstraction was widespread. And yet, in the years between the World Wars, the human figure remained the site of significant artistic activity. So argues John Klein, associate professor of art history and archaeology, in Face and Figure in European Art, 1928-1945, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

If the answer to a poem is another poem, the answer to music, clearly, is more music. On Feb. 24, the WUSTL Wind Ensemble will pair music by Charles Gounod and Johann Sebastian Bach with works from two contemporary composers in a free concert titled “The Old and the New.”

Great literature speaks to us across the years and miles. In The Eternal City, her National Book Award-nominated collection, poet Kathleen Graber speaks back, offering reflective yet surprisingly conversational responses to writers and artists from Marcus Aurelius and William Blake to Milan Kundera and Johnny Depp. On Thursday, Feb. 21, Graber will read from her work for The Writing Program Reading Series.