Arts & Sciences

Despite all the “irrational exuberance” April 26 surrounding the first-ever news conference conducted by a Federal Reserve bank chair, the issues that Chairman Ben Bernanke chose to dance around were equally unsurprising as those he managed to address, says Michele Boldrin, PhD, the chair of the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Mormyridae, a family of African fishes that communicate by means of weak electic discharges, has more than 200 species. Given its diversity a Washington University in St. Louis biologist wondered whether changes in electric communication might have influenced rates of speciation. His work showed that the fishes evolved a complex signal-processing brain before a burst of speciation, that signal variation was higher among fishes with that brain, and that these fishes could distinguish among subtly different discharges, whereas others could not.Together it adds up to a strong case for brain evolution triggering increased diversification.  

Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, recognized the challenges faculty were having in accepting some of the more prestigious and highly competitive fellowships and last year instituted a Competitive Fellowship Leave program, which allows humanities and social sciences faculty members to minimize the unintended negative consequences of accepting competitive fellowships.

Between 40-50 Washington University in St. Louis students each year make up the January Program, a unique experience in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. It allows talented students like Ogi Kwon opportunities to transition to WUSTL and arrive on campus five months after their peers without skipping a beat.

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.

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.”  

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.  

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.