Arts & Sciences

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.

A team of scientists including physicist Johanna Nagy at Washington University in St. Louis successfully launched a balloon-borne experiment studying the early universe on Dec. 21. The instrument, called SPIDER, was carried aloft by a scientific balloon from its launch pad in Antarctica.

Two Washington University in St. Louis anthropology researchers recently won grants from the Leakey Foundation.

Jake Funkhouser, a ngraduate student in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, received a $2,000 research grant from the Animal Behavior Society.

Ilaria Patania, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, received a $25,000 research grant from The Leakey Foundation.

Fangqiong Ling at the McKelvey School of Engineering and Likai Chen in Arts & Sciences developed a machine learning model that uses the assortment of microbes found in wastewater to tease out how many individual people they represent. Their study was published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Recent Chinese protests over COVID-19 restrictions provided a blueprint for future activism to prevent government from infringing on civil liberties, says Zhao Ma, associate professor of modern Chinese history and culture in Arts & Sciences. That could spell trouble for President Xi’s administration.