Arts & Sciences

Graduate students from across Washington University gathered April 4 for the Graduate Professional Council’s (GPC) Bridging GAPS Awards Ceremony in Danforth University Center. The annual ceremony, organized by the GPC, is a recognition and celebration of the important role that graduate student leadership plays in enhancing interdisciplinary endeavors and the graduate student community.

It is perhaps a cliché that solving the environmental issues of the 21st century will require creativity, but the reverse is also true. For professionals in design or the visual and performing arts, the modern environmental movement is a source of both professional challenge and increasing opportunity. At 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, Washington University’s Edison Theatre and Office of Sustainability will host a panel colloquium on “Environmentalism and the Arts.”  

Three Arts & Sciences juniors have recently been awarded prestigious national scholarships, with a fourth receiving an honorable mention. Two students received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and one student received the Morris K. Udall Scholarship for the 2011-12 academic year. 

Twelve students at Washington University in St. Louis who had participated in an unusual biology course as freshmen, recently shared the honors as authors on a peer-reviewed research paper that appeared in the journal PLoS One. They had found two bacteriophages, viruses that prey exclusively on bacteria, in the soil of  Clayton, Mo.and University City, Mo., both suburbs of St. Louis. As the finders, they had the naming rights; the new phages are called Angelica and Uncle Howie.

The Washington University Opera Workshop will perform excerpts from five beloved operas at 8 p.m. Friday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center Ballroom. The program will highlight comedy and romance with scenes from works by Gaetano Donizetti, Benjamin Britten, Otto Nicolai and Leo Delibes. 

A husband goes missing. A celebrated writer fights to form words. Two young men embark on a pharmaceutically enhanced museum tour while a shell-shocked veteran wanders the streets. Welcome to Chris Kammerer’s The Stroke Scriptures, winner of Washington University’s biennial A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, which will receive its world premiere in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.  

Pliable, durable and lightweight, aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, used to make everything from soda cans to airplane wings to electrical transmission lines. Yet even this most versatile of elements is put to the test by The Aluminum Show, the international sensation coming to Edison Theatre April 30. Aluminum is puffed into pillows, shot out of cannons, sewn into costumes, wrapped around audience members and transformed into living creatures of astonishing warmth and complexity.

That FOX Broadcasting Company has a conservative slant and MSNBC skews liberal may reflect widespread opinion, but a Washington University in St. Louis study suggests that news networks’ biases can be measured. Published in March 2011 in the journal Behavioral Research Methods, the findings are important in their validation of a new research tool developed by Washington University psychologists, according to lead author Nicholas Holtzman, a graduate student in psychology in Arts & Sciences at the university.

The role of food, and of meals shared and meals denied in the struggle for American citizenship, will be the topic of Rafia Zafar’s Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 20, in Lab Sciences, Room 300. This Assembly Series event, the final one for this academic year, is free and open to the public.

This year, the Spector Prize was shared by two recipients: Adeetee Bhide and Matthew Leach. Bhide and Leach were nominated by their research mentors for their outstanding work in research and the substantial contributions they made to their field of work.