Arts & Sciences

Arts & Sciences recognized the achievements of six alumni during the 13th Annual Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Awards Ceremony, held April 29 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis. A new tradition was started this year with the addition of an awards dinner hosted by Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, and the Arts & Sciences National Council.

A memorial tribute for Richard E. Norberg, PhD, retired professor and longtime chair of physics in Arts & Sciences, will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, June 1, in Crow Hall, Room 201. A reception will follow in Compton Laboratory, Room 241.

A seven-year experiment shows that pond communities bear the imprint of random events in their past, such as the order in which species were introduced into the ponds. This finding locates one of the wellsprings of biodiversity but also suggests that it may not be possible to restore ecosystems whose history we cannot recreate.

WUSTL’s Lifelong Learning Institute — a community outreach education program for seniors that offers a variety of non-credit academic courses — celebrates its 15th anniversary this spring. LLI courses emphasize peer learning and active class participation.  

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded Washington University  a 2010 Research University Grant to support the devleopment of creative, research-based courses and curricula. The university will receive $1.6 million over a period of four years/ HHMI also awarded Sarah C. R. Elgin, PhD, the Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, a long-time HHMI professor, $80,000 over four years to support her work on important problems facing science education. 

An archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis is helping to reveal for the first time a snapshot of rural life in China during the Han Dynasty. The rural farming village of Sanyangzhuang was flooded by silt-heavy water from the Yellow River around 2,000 year ago. Working with Chinese colleagues, T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, is working to excavate the site, which offers a exceptionally well-preserved view of daily life in Western China more than 2,000 years ago.

Three WUSTL students have been awarded a State Department Critical Language Scholarship to study critical needs languages abroad this summer.

Homeland security and other regulatory agencies are creating jobs and a record-breaking budget according to a new study from the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis and the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center.  A Decade of Growth in the Regulators’ Budget: An Analysis of the U.S. Budget for Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011 details the rise in regulatory spending and who gets the lion’s share of this year’s $59 billion federal regulatory budget.

Few student leaders at Washington University have done more to promote issues of diversity awareness on campus than Fernando Cutz, president of the senior class and this year’s student Commencement speaker.

Much of the world’s population is watching the FIFA World Cup, which began June 11 in South Africa. A majority of those fans will be outside the United States however, where soccer has never been able to gain the popular foothold it enjoys in many of the world’s nations. Several reasons exist for this phenomenon, says Stephan Schindler, PhD, professor and chair of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences, who has taught courses on the global culture of soccer.