McKelvey School of Engineering

The government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, Indian corporate leaders and Washington University in St. Louis have invested $2.5 million to launch the Indo-U.S. Advanced Bioenergy Consortium for Second Generation Biofuels (IUABC). The goal of the center is to increase biomass yield in plants and algae, enabling downstream commercial development for cost-effective, efficient and environmentally sustainable production of advanced biofuels.

Kurt Thoroughman, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, was selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s sixth Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium Oct. 26-29 in Irvine, Calif.

Scientists from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis have shown a new way to reverse or eliminate energy loss in optical systems such as lasers. They are doing so by, ironically, adding loss to a laser system to actually reap energy gains. In other words, they’ve invented a way to win by losing.​​​

Washington University in St. Louis alumnus W. E. Moerner, PhD, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Moerner shares the award, announced Oct. 8 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with Eric Betzig, PhD, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Stefan W. Hell, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, in Germany. The trio received the award for developing super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.​

In the 2013 book, “Fires, Fuel & the Fate of 3 Billion: The State of the Energy Impoverished,” Brown School Professor Gautam N. Yadama, PhD, and critically acclaimed photographer Mark Katzman, presented the complex story of energy impoverishment — an issue that affects a staggering 3 billion people worldwide — by inserting the reader into the personal stories of struggle and survival throughout rural India. At 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom, Yadama will present his work for the Assembly Series and the School of Law’s Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series.

​In advance of Washington University in St. Louis’ Major-Minor Fair on Monday, Oct. 6, Matthew DeVoll, PhD, assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and dean of sophomores, talks about the choices facing second-year students and the options open to them.

Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a prestigious BRAIN Initiative Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Wang’s three-year, $2.7 million award, is one of 58 grants totaling $46 million announced Sept. 30 by Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, director of the NIH, in Washington, D.C.

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received a four-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for her work titled “XPS: FULL: FP: Collaborative Research: Taming Parallelism: Optimally Exploiting High-throughput Parallel Architectures.”

Over the course of about 24 hours Sept. 22-23, four student athletes from Washington University in St. Louis were tabbed by national coaches’ organizations as “Athlete of the Week.” It’s an unprecedented honor in school history, one in which Athletics Director Josh Whitman calls “inspirational.” To put it into perspective, the university received only six such honors throughout the entire academic sports year in 2013-14.

​​Steven C. George, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named the Elvera & William Stuckenberg Professor of Technology & Human Affairs. He was installed Sept. 22.