Arts & Sciences

Talk about climbing the walls. In Leo, the gravity-defying new show from Berlin’s Circle of Eleven, the acrobatic star, Tobias Wegner, is trapped in a room seemingly absent the laws of physics. Leo is one of two striking works of physical theatre set to launch Washington University in St. Louis’ 2012-13 Edison Ovations Series this fall. In all, the season will feature 14 events by nationally and internationally known dance, theatre and musical artists.

How strong are the links in food webs? An experiment at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrates that they’re strong enough for a disturbance  to propagate across four trophic levels and two ecosystems. The experiment demonstrates that invasive species such as purple loosestrife could have broad effects on surrounding plant and animal communities, many of them cryptic.

A new assay that uses mitochondrial DNA that mutates faster than nuclear DNA has allowed scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to identify one of the major animal reservoirs for the ehlichioses, STARI and other tick-borne diseases in the southeastern United States. The animal turned out to be the eastern gray squirrel.

A cross-Atlantic collaboration between scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, both in Grenoble, France, has revealed the workings of a switch that activates plant hormones, tags them for storage or marks them for destruction.

Bradley P. Stoner, MD, PhD, has been elected president of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association, the national society that represents researchers and clinicians specializing in sexually transmitted infections.

Math and music might seem a strange combination to some. Certainly many famous performers are able to bring audiences to their feet without once thinking about ratios or anything else overtly mathematical. But David Wright, chairman of the mathematics department at Washington University in St. Louis, always has been gifted with an unusual, even eerie, ability to hear both the music and the math simultaneously.

Sixteen St. Louis youth will be in Forest Park on June 13 tracking box turtles, fitted with telemetry devices — all to help with a project aimed at studying box turtle movements and their health. The 12- and 13-year-olds are participating in a pilot study designed by scientists from the Saint Louis Zoo and Washington University in St. Louis to document box turtle movements and their health status in urban and rural areas in and around St. Louis.

The American Academy of Microbiology has named two Washington University in St. Louis faculty members as fellows: Robert Blankenship, PhD, and John Heuser, MD.

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) honored Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, with the 2011-12 AIBS Distinguished Scientist Award June 1.

Each spring, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences recognizes outstanding teaching assistants who have been nominated by a department or a program. This year, 18 graduate students received the 2011-12 Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. A ceremony was held April 19 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.