Arts & Sciences

Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, won a $60,164 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project aimed at giving students effective learning strategies for STEM courses.

Something shocking has happened in the US economy in recent years: average workers have started to move forward. But when the period of low unemployment and rising workers’ power ends, without further legal support, workers’ bargaining chips are likely to disappear with it.

Major advances in battery technologies will bring us a big step closer this year to large-scale renewable energy goals, international energy independence and a big reduction in greenhouse gases, according to Arts & Sciences’ Michael Wysession.

Anuradhika Puri, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences, won the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association’s Milton Safenowitz Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Models based on an average cell are useful, but they may not accurately describe how individual cells really work. Molecular biologists use actual single-cell data to update the framework for understanding the relationship between cell growth, DNA replication and division in a bacterial system.

Far from orderly “brick-by-brick” assembly, the internal structures of cells are grown in stochastic bursts, according to physicist Shankar Mukherji in Arts & Sciences, author of a Jan. 6 study in Physical Review Letters.

Mathematician Soumendra Lahiri, in Arts & Sciences, received two grants from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research projects.

At the Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees meeting Dec. 2, several faculty members were granted tenure. Their new roles took effect Dec. 2.

Douglas Flowe, an associate professor of history in Arts & Sciences, will be featured in “The Lie Detector,” a PBS documentary about the invention, promise and unintended consequences of the polygraph machine.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. The study from the laboratory of Jeffrey Catalano in Arts & Sciences was published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience.