Arts & Sciences

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoChristine Kirmaier (left) and Dewey Holten making adjustments in their sophisticated laser laboratory. Their findings advance the understanding of photosynthesis.In the famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” the persona, forced to travel one of two roads, takes the one less traveled by, and “that has made all the difference.” Chemists at Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, in kinship with Frost, have modified a key protein in a bacterium to move electrons along a pathway not normally traveled by. They got this to happen 70 percent of the time. That yield “makes all the difference.” More…

Olga Pontes & Craig PikaardThe protein HDA6 shows up as a red stain in this Arabidopsis leaf cell nucleus.A team of researchers, including biologists at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered the key role one protein plays in a major turn-off — in this case, the turning off of thousands of nearly identical genes in a hybrid plant. Studying the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, in which one parental set of ribosomal genes in a hybrid is silenced, Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., Washington University professor of biology in Arts & Sciences and colleagues have identified the protein HDA6 as an important player in the silencing. More…

“When colleagues have professed great satisfaction about being a part of this community, it validates what we are doing,” Chancellor Wrighton said.

He’s on the faculty of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Music Conservatory and is director of the Officina Musicale Dell’Altipiano Delle Rocche.

The Washington University Chamber Choir and the Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present the show at 3 p.m. April 30 in Graham Chapel.

Schaal and Epstein are among 195 men and women elected this year by the academy, an organization formed in 1870 to cultivate the arts and sciences.

The Linguistic Profiling and Linguistic Human Rights conference will be held on campus April 28-29. Sponsored by African and African American Studies in Arts & Sciences and the Ford Foundation, the conference will explore issues surrounding legal considerations of linguistic profiling, fair housing, language restriction on the job and racial, sexual and deaf discrimination, among others.

Warner Bros. Entertainment*Duma*Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Program in Film and Media Studies, both in Arts & Sciences, will host a two-day symposium on Children’s Films and their audiences. Presented in conjunction with Cinema St. Louis, the event will feature a keynote address by Nicholas Sammond, author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (2005), as well as screenings of the films Duma (2005) and Saving Shiloh (2006), the latter of which was shot in St. Louis last year.

Washington University in St. Louis was named one of the top three Best Places to Work in the St. Louis Business Journal’s annual survey of area employees. At a dinner and reception April 20 at The Westin Hotel, Washington University was named the best workplace in the large employer category.

Max PucciarielloGiuseppe ScoteseRenowned Italian pianist Giuseppe Scotese will present a piano recital featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) at 8 p.m. Monday, May 1, in Graham Chapel. The program will juxtapose parallel works by Bach and Busoni, the latter of whom is probably best known for his grand transcriptions of Bach’s organ music for the modern piano. (Vladimir Horowitz and other great 20th century pianists regularly included Busoni’s transcriptions in their concert repertoire.)