McKelvey School of Engineering

The School of Engineering & Applied Science celebrated five of its top alumni during the 2013 Alumni Achievement Awards dinner April 18 at the Coronado Ballroom in St. Louis. The school presented four Alumni Achievement Awards, one Young Alumni Award and the Dean’s Award.

St. Louis is becoming widely recognized as a hub for entrepreneurship, and WUSTL students are taking advantage of the close proximity to great resources by starting their own business ventures — with the help of a groundbreaking class. The Hatchery, offered by Olin Business School but open to all university undergraduate students, is one of the university’s capstone entrepreneurship courses. Here, students hold the Olin Cup, the top prize in the top commercial entrepreneurship competition on campus.

As students begin to leave campus for the summer, many will head off to internships, hoping to add to their classroom experiences and enhance their future opportunities by immersing themselves in the real world of work. But to get the most out of the experience, it’s imperative that they have a clear plan.

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, PhD, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the Ninth Annual Ryckman Lecture at 1:30 p.m. Friday, April 19. Alvarez-Cohen, the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor and past chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, will speak on “From Individuals to Community: […]

​Two prominent environmental thinkers and activists will address climate change, biodiversity and pollution during a lecture at 7 p.m. April 10 in Whitaker Hall Auditorium at Washington University in St. Louis. The lecture titled “To Hell in a Handbasket?: The Global Environment and Sustainability” is free and open to the public. The primary sponsors are University College — the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences — and the International Affairs program in University College.

A team of four WUSTL students, including sophmores, Grace Kuo and Amy Patterson, shown to left accepting a trophy, won the College Nationals in the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest on March 30. Click here for a video of a rolling ball bearing setting off a chain reaction in “Rube Goldberg’s office” that eventually drop a hammer on a nail–the assigned task.

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, many faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure. Read more to see who they are.

The American Academy of Neurology issued new guidelines last week for assessing school-aged athletes with head injuries on the field. The message: if in doubt, sit out. With more than 3 million sports-related concussions occurring in the U.S. each year, from school children to professional athletes, the issue is a burgeoning health crisis.

As part of its Clinton Global Initiative University efforts, Washington University in St. Louis has announced a major institutional commitment to action around the important issue of sustainability.

In an engineering breakthrough, a Washington University in St. Louis biomedical researcher has discovered a way to use light and color to measure oxygen in individual red blood cells in real time. The technology, developed by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, could eventually be used to determine how oxygen is delivered to normal and diseased tissues or how various disease therapies impact oxygen delivery throughout the body.