Arts & Sciences

Hillel J. Kieval, the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought in Arts & Sciences, has won the Silver Medal of the Faculty of Arts from Charles University in Prague.

New analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study by Ryan Bogdan’s lab in Arts & Sciences finds no link to depression in children with prenatal exposure to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) drugs.

Washington University in St. Louis has joined SlaveVoyages, a collaborative digital initiative that compiles records related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. William Acree, co-director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE²), says membership provides university faculty and students an opportunity to both benefit from and contribute to SlaveVoyages’ critical scholarship.

Sophia Hayes, currently interim vice dean of graduate education and professor of chemistry, and William Acree, currently dean’s fellow for graduate education initiatives and professor of Spanish, soon will take on new roles that reflect their ongoing commitment to graduate education at Washington University.

Sachiko Amari, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is part of the international team that described results from the first sample-return mission to a carbonaceous asteroid, the JAXA Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu. The study was published June 9 in Science.

David Strait and Yeganeh Sekhavati, both in Arts & Sciences, won a $26,037 grant from the National Science Foundation to support doctoral dissertation research.

K. Eliza Williamson, a lecturer in Arts & Sciences, was awarded a postdoctoral fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to research families raising children diagnosed with Zika syndrome in Brazil. Williamson is also the incoming senior book reviews editor for American Ethnologist.

Joan Strassmann and David Queller, both in Arts & Sciences, received a $141,578 supplemental award from the National Science Foundation for research on amoeba-bacteria cooperation.

The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recently awarded six Graduate Student Fellowships for the 2022-23 academic year.

Arts & Sciences biologists from the lab of Jonathan Myers determined that tree beta diversity — a measure of site-to-site variation in the composition of species present within a given area — matters more for the ecosystem than other components of biodiversity at larger scales.