Arts & Sciences

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.

Scientific efforts to explain feeblemindedness, delinquency and racial inferiorities date to the Spanish Inquisition. And while the horrors of Nazi Germany exposed fatal flaws in science’s quest to build the master race, the ethical dilemmas posed by the science of eugenics are far from behind us, warns an anthropologist from Washington University in St. Louis.

In 2011, acclaimed pianist and composer Amina Figarova left Europe for the United States. The result is Twelve, a suite of new songs that Figarova wrote shortly after the move. On Feb. 21, Figarova will visit WUSTL’s Jazz at Holmes Series as part of a 14-city tour in support of Twelve, her 12th full-length album.