Arts & Sciences

Author and political scientist Cathy Cohen studies American politics and particularly how they affect African-Americans, women and the LGBTQ community – never ignoring the intersections between these identity categories. She will be on campus April 9 to give a lecture titled “Race, Sex and Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama.”

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.

Featuring more than 100 students from the WUSTL Choirs and WUSTL Symphony Orchestra, the annual Chancellor’s Concert is among the university’s largest performances of the year. “American Voices,” the 2013 concert, which takes place April 7, will feature music by Leonard Bernstein, Randall Thompson, Aaron Copland and Howard Hanson.

The Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) disappeared from the Negev, the desert region in southern Israel, in the 1920s. But a remnant herd survived in the Shah of Iran’s zoo. Some of these animals were reintroduced to the desert beginning in 1982. Recently scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Washington University in St. Louis have been inventing clever new ways to check on the status of these famously elusive animals.

Mindfulness — paying attention to one’s current experience in a nonjudgmental way — might help us to learn more about our own personalities, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

The popular Saturday Science seminar series celebrates its 20th year by tackling on paradoxes, those fascinating little conundrums that are sometimes just words colliding but other times are cracks in our understanding of the world that, when prised open, give access to a much deeper understanding. The first lecture is Saturday, April 6. ​

M.J. Warsi, PhD, a well-known linguist and researcher who teacheslinguistics and Indian languages at Washington University in St. Louis,received the Inspirational Leadership Award at an international conference of intellectuals held recently at India International Centre, New Delhi.

For his undergraduate thesis project, senior Thomas Muschninski working with professor of physics Jonathan Katz published an article in Nature Climate Change showing that the signature of an increase in storminess could be extracted from precipitation data for the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The scientists suspect the same signature lies hidden under naturally stormier weather at other locations as well.

The Henry Luce Foundation named Jeremy I. Pivor one of 18 scholars in the 40th class of Luce Scholars this February. Chosen from a field of 168 nominees, he is the third Washington University student to be named a scholar in the past four years.

Two biologists at Washington University in St. Louis were delighted to discover a meticulous dataset on a plant-pollinator network recorded by Illinois naturalist Charles Robertson between 1884 and 1916. Re-collecting part of Robertson’s network, they learned that although the network has compensated for some losses, battered by climate change and habitat loss it is now weaker and less resilient than in Robertson’s time.