McKelvey School of Engineering

Interdisciplinary faculty collaboration is fast becoming a hallmark of Washington University in St. Louis. To help support interdisciplinary teaching, the Office of the Provost announces the second round of the Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant Program. The application deadline for the teaching grants is December 1. In order to assist prospective applicants in putting together proposals, the Provost will hold a workshop from 3:30-5 p.m. in DUC 234 on October 23 facilitated by faculty who were successful in the previous round. Please RSVP for the workshop to Marion G. Crain, JD, the Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law and vice provost at WUSTL, at mgcrain@wulaw.wustl.edu.

Washington University in St. Louis has been ranked among the top schools in the nation for entrepreneurship by Entrepreneur magazine’s annual Princeton Review report. The annual survey names the schools with the top 25 undergraduate and top 25 graduate entrepreneurship programs in the nation.

Chelsea Clinton announced during the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York on Sept. 25 that Washington University in St. Louis will serve as the host of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), April 5-7, 2013, on the Danforth Campus.  President Bill Clinton launched CGI U in 2007 to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world. Each year, CGI U hosts a meeting where students, youth organizations, topic experts, and celebrities discuss solutions to pressing global issues.

A team of engineers at the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University has received two grants totaling more than $1.3 million to develop innovative ways to cleanly burn coal for energy. The awards are part of a more than $5 billion investment strategy by the Obama Administration in clean coal technologies and research and development. ​

Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, director of WUSTL’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), has become the inaugural holder of the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor.

For 100 years, the dogma has been that amino-acid sequences determine protein folding and that the folded structure determines the protein’s function. But as a Washington University in St. Louis engineer explains in the  Sept. 20 issue of Science, a large class of proteins doesn’t adhere to the structure-function paradigm. Called intrinsically disordered proteins, these proteins fail fold either in whole or in part and yet they are functional.

Washington University undergraduate students with great solutions to problems can win $25,000 to take their innovative ideas from concept to their own business. The School of Engineering & Applied Science has launched the Discovery Competition with the goal to promote new and innovative discoveries to solve challenges or needs.

This summer, WUSTL students participating in the International Experience in Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering went to Brazil to study its booming biofuel industry. Applications now are being accepted for next year’s trip to Australia. The topics to be studied are coal, coal-seam gas, wastewater treatment, biofuels and the geothermal industry.

Two new interdisciplinary exective education courses bring together experts from across the Danforth Campus to explore emerging concepts that will impact the future of industries, economies and the environment. The two-day and three-day seminars will take place near the end of October.

Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering has received an National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award to explore novel imaging techniques using light that promise significant improvements in biomedical imaging and light therapy.