McKelvey School of Engineering

Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of EngineersBarge traffic makes its way through a lock on the Upper Mississippi.”Our Rivers: A Sustainable Resource?” is the focus of a public education forum that four Washington University faculty will lead as part of a community-wide symposium being held in conjunction with the 5th annual St. Louis Earth Day Celebration, April 22-23. The sustainable rivers program will be held April 22 from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will feature Washington University faculty Charles Buescher, professor of environmental engineering, Robert Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and William Lowry, Ph.D., professor of political science in Arts & Sciences. The colloquium will provide a background history of the rivers in our region and their various uses in transportation, agriculture, power production, recreation and public water supply.

The new center aims to support the study, research and teaching of ethics in areas ranging from medicine to business to architecture.

The Washington University School of Medicine and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work are both ranked second in the nation, according to new graduate and professional rankings released April 2 by U.S. News & World Report magazine. The School of Medicine was tied for second in 2003 and has placed in the top 10 every year since the annual rankings began in 1987. It has ranked first in student selectivity — a measurement of student quality based on Medical College Admission Test scores, undergraduate grade-point average and the proportion of applicants selected — every year since 1998.

BrentA large team of researchers, including a computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has effectively completed the genome sequence of the common laboratory brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, This makes the third mammal to be sequenced, following the human and mouse.

Clip of the award-winning video that shows oil mixing with water.What happens when water and oil mix? A tornado. An award-winning video from a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis shows how: http://mesun4.wustl.edu/ME/faculty/aqshen/news.html

Anthrax is nasty stuff. An environmental engineer at WUSTL uses smart catalysts in his device that can detect the presence of airborne anthrax and disable it.An environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis with his doctoral student has patented a device for trapping and deactivating microbial particles. The work is promising in the war on terrorism for deactivating airborne bioagents and bioweapons such as the smallpox virus, anthrax and ricin, and also in routine indoor air ventilation applications such as in buildings and aircraft cabins.

To meet design and cost changes, industry and government are considering clockless computing.Computing royalty, including Ivan Sutherland, the father of computer graphics, and Wesley A. Clark, the designer of the world’s first personal computer, will gather at a computing symposium Friday, March 26th, 2004, from 1:00-5:30 p.m. at Washington University in St. Louis’s Whitaker Hall Auditorium. As part of the University’s 150th anniversary of its founding, participants will honor time by contemplating how computing can evade time as the industry prepares to go clockless.

The School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis will present the international symposium Critical Praxis for the Emerging Culture: A Collaborative Investigation Into the Nature of Cultural Transformation Brought About by Technology and Media April 15, 16 and 17.

Washington University faculty and staff make news around the world. Following is a representative sampling of media coverage from clippings and electronic sources. For the most recent clips, see the Clips Index

Washington University faculty and staff make news around the world. Following is a representative sampling of media coverage from clippings and electronic sources.