Brown School

Luis Zayas, PhD, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, will be on this week’s Latino USA program on NPR discussing Latina teen suicide in the United States. Listen to the program at http://www.latinousa.org/916-2/.

University City Council member L. Michael Glickert (left) presents Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, with a proclamation during a city council meeting Oct. 18. The proclamation celebrates Sherraden, a University City resident, being named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis will host a symposium titled “What Hurts, What Works, and What Have We Learned in Eliminating Health Disparities” from 8 a.m.-noon on Thursday, Oct. 21, at the Eric P. Newman Education Center on the Medical Campus.

With an election right around the corner and the media saturated with political pundits, the role of government may seem “all politics.” Students can get a fresh perspective on how government works with a series of events Oct. 20 and 21 that demonstrate how people are making a difference through careers in civil service.

“Since the founding of the Peace Corps 50 years ago, international service programs have grown dramatically across the public, private and nonprofit sectors,” says Amanda Moore McBride, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School and expert on civic service as Research Director at the School’s Center for Social Development (CSD). To date, most research on the field of international service has focused solely on the volunteers themselves. While impacts on volunteers are important, CSD researches not only the impacts on volunteers but also the impacts on the host communities and organizations that they serve. In their most recent study, McBride and colleagues looked at the impact of international service on the development of volunteers’ international contacts and how those contacts, in turn, are used to further host community development around the world.  

Eric Edmonds, PhD, associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College, will speak about “Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor” at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 13, at Washington University’s Goldfarb Hall, Room 132. His talk is a follow-up discussion to Nicholas Kristof’s recent WUSTL presentation on his book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Playground, a film on child trafficking in the United States, will be screened at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 5, in Steinberg Hall auditorium. A panel discussion featuring Libby Spears, the film’s director, and local experts will follow the documentary.

Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times and best-selling author, will present “Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide” at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 4, in Graham Chapel. Kristof’s talk, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Lecture in Social Policy, is free and open to the public.

A 10-year study on Child Development Accounts (CDAs) has confirmed their viability as a tool for long-term asset building. Beginning as early as birth, CDAs are investment accounts that allow parents and children to accumulate savings for post-secondary education, homeownership or business initiatives. 

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:’Times New Roman’;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} Missouri has one of the highest statewide smoking averages in the country, more than 23 percent. And racial and ethnic minorities, people with lower incomes and education levels, Medicaid recipients and the LGBT community smoke or experience secondhand smoke at a rate significantly higher than the state average. These findings are highlighted in a recent report by the Center for Tobacco Policy Research (CTPR) at Washington University in St. Louis. The report, “Who is Most Affected? Tobacco-Related Disparities in Missouri,” identifies statewide differences related to who is smoking, who is exposed to secondhand smoke and who is quitting.