Arts & Sciences

Junior Nick Yozamp, a biology major in Arts & Sciences, won the 2010 Jeopardy! College Championship and a $100,000 cash prize. The St. Cloud, Minn., native emerged victorious after the two-week competition by outplaying 14 undergraduates from across the country. Yozamp is the first WUSTL student to win the title.

As Iran celebrates the 31st anniversary of its Islamic revolution, Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., professor of Persian language and literature and a native of Iran, suggests that the Feb. 11 anniversary offers yet another example of how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skillfully manipulates the Western media into providing unwitting support for his campaign to stifle the nation’s opposition movement. Her commentary appears online at Counter Punch.

Medical anthropologist Carole H. Browner, Ph.D., will speak on “Gender, Health and Reproduction: Transnational Perspectives” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. The lecture is part of the new Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Health.

Ralph Quatrano, immediate past dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, has been named dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Over the past 40 years, PHILADANCO has grown from a small community arts organization into a world-renowned troupe that mixes African-American cultural traditions with ballet, modern, jazz and other dance forms. This weekend, the trailblazing dance company will help the WUSTL community celebrate Black History Month with a pair of performances for the Edison Theatre OVATIONS Series Friday, Feb. 19, and Saturday, Feb. 20. 

Equipped with dialogue as pithy as their helmets, three female Victorian adventurers journey across time, space and history in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences comedy  “On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning),” opening Friday, Feb. 19, in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

Brian Evenson — whose intensely macabre yet darkly comic and subtly philosophical novels and stories led American Book Review to praise him as “essentially our poet laureate of violence” — will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, for The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.

WUSTL researchers have shed light on one of the most important events in earth history, the conquest of land by plants. No would-be colonizer could have survived without the ability to deal with dehydration, a major threat for organisms accustomed to soaking in water. Clues to how the first land plants managed to avoid drying out are provided by the drought-tolerant moss Physcomitrella patens.

Saxophonist Jason Swagler opens the spring Jazz at Holmes Series at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4. The series, which was launched in 1996, features professional jazz musicians from around St. Louis and abroad performing in Holmes Lounge — a casual, coffeehouse-style setting — most Thursday evenings throughout the fall and spring semesters. 

Experts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve and around the country will be on the Washington University campus Friday, Feb. 5, to discuss the Federal Reserve’s role during the recent recession and future directions for policy. The free public conference, “Monetary Policy Amid Economic Turbulence,” begins at 2:30 p.m. in the Bryan Cave Moot Court Room, Anheuser-Busch Hall.