McKelvey School of Engineering

On Saturday, Nov. 2, Washington University’s “family” will come from near and far to gather in St. Louis and celebrate its founding in 1853. The annual Founders Day dinner and ceremony, sponsored by the WUSTL Alumni Association, will feature an address by Jon Huntsman Jr., former U.S. ambassador to China. Other highlights include the presentation of Distinguished Faculty and Alumni awards and the Robert S. Brookings Awards.

University of Missouri-St. Louis chancellor emeritus Blanche Touhill and Washington University emeritus chancellor William Danforth led the formation of a joint undergraduate engineering program between the two schools, which saw its first class in the fall of 1993. Fast-forward 20 years and it has graduated nearly 650 students. Since 2008 the program has grown nearly 50 percent, and about 75 percent of the graduates stay in the St. Louis area.

Christopher Gill, PhD, has received a four-year, $398,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to promote the improved safety of cyber-physical systems such as cars and planes.

School of Medicine faculty recently presented about 20 ideas to Washington University students during IDEA Labs’ inaugural ‘Problem Day’ in hopes that they might be able to devise solutions. IDEA Labs — which stands for Innovation, Design & Engineering in Action — is a bioengineering design incubator founded last year as a joint venture of the schools of Medicine and Engineering & Applied Science and the Division of Biology & Biomedical Sciences.

A team of Washington University in St. Louis engineers and physicians is combining areas of expertise to prevent hospitalized patients from deteriorating while in the hospital and from being readmitted soon after discharge.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science has brought on some new faculty members this academic year. “Read more” to learn about their backgrounds and expertise.

Leaders from two of the world’s top research universities and several major international corporations will gather in St. Louis Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 19-20, for the Washington University in St. Louis-Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Corporate Conclave, aimed at strengthening the U.S.-India connection around innovation and education, particularly in addressing pressing global issues.

Although an irregular heartbeat is a common malady in the United States, affecting an estimated 5 million people, the treatments for it are limited in scope and effectiveness. Now, Igor Efimov, PhD, at Washington University in St. Louis, is studying a new potential treatment that may be much more effective and less painful for patients.

American produce is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before reaching its point of sale. In St. Louis, the 14-acre Magic Chef complex sits empty and unused. Graduate student Haley O’Brien wants to address both problems by growing hydroponic tomatoes on The Hill, an historic Italian-American enclave that boasts some of the finest pasta sauces in the Midwest.

A technology proposed by Lihong Wang, PhD, professor of engineering, may hold the key to detecting tumor cell circulation, potentially enabling earlier therapeutic interventions and curative surgical treatment and improving survival of patients with cancer.