School of Medicine

Fourth-year medical students learned Friday, March 21, where they will go for residency training, the next stage of their careers. The annual event also brought a marriage proposal for one student, to the delight of students gathered for Match Day. Shown is student Jacqueline Chen upon learning she will go to Barnes-Jewish Hospital to focus on internal medicine for her residency.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have learned that the problems people with autism have with memory formation, higher-level thinking and social interactions may be partially attributable to the activity of a receptor inside brain cells, highlighted with green in this image.

The 10th Annual Washington University Postdoc Scientific Symposium will be held Thursday, April 3, to recognize and showcase the important contributions of postdocs to scientific enterprise at the university. Registration is open through March 27.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed legislation Wednesday, March 19, on the Medical Campus to increase the affordability and accessibility of oral chemotherapy medications. ​

Children with a rare genetic disorder that causes missing and malformed teeth, sparse hair and the inability to perspire are born without a protein thought to be key to such development. A clinical trial now underway at the School of Medicine aims to see if the void can be filled with a replacement protein. Shown are Sarah and Robert Yaroch and their son Andrew, who is participating in the trial.

​Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, a disease-prevention expert at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will receive the 2014 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)–American Cancer Society Award.​

Babies born prematurely are surviving in increasing numbers, but many withstand complications of early birth only to suffer late-onset sepsis — life-threatening bloodstream infections that strike after infants reach 72 hours of age. The causes of late-onset sepsis have not been clear. But now, researchers at the School of Medicine led by Phillip I. Tarr, MD, and Barbara B. Warner, MD, have discovered that preterm babies’ guts harbor infectious microbes that can cause this condition.

Yehuda Ben-Shahar and his team at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that some mRNAs have a side job unrelated to making the protein they encode. They act as regulatory molecules as well, preventing other genes from making protein by marking their mRNA molecules for destruction.

The St. Louis FameLab, a science communication competition sponsored by National Geographic and NASA, recently gave young scientists a chance to present their science to nonscientists in three minutes. Efforts such as this are becoming increasingly common as scientists try to reconnect with the public. Some universities now require three-minute video presentations for every thesis or dissertation — or even for every published journal article.

Graduate and professional students presented their research during the 19th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium, held Feb. 22 in Whitaker Hall. Suthatip Jullamon, a law student, explains her research comparing class-action law in Thailand with the U.S.