The School of Law’s 22nd annual Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series fall lineup features leading lawyers, judges, academics and authors addressing several high-profile issues, including free speech, voting rights, racial justice and government service. 

The law school’s interdisciplinary approach to current legal and policy issues can be seen through the collaboration with sponsors across campus, including: the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement; the Assembly Series; the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy; the American Constitution Society; the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Diversity; the Prison Education Program; the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Arts & Sciences; the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics;  and the School of Law’s Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute. 

All lectures are free and open to the public. 

For more information, visit the law website.

Upcoming lectures 

Noon Sept. 16, Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom

Dan Tokaji, associate dean and the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law at Ohio State University, will discuss “Voting Rights, Gerrymandering, and the Uncertain Future of Democracy.”

3 p.m. Sept.  27, Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum

George Sanchez, professor of American studies and ethnicity and of history at University of Southern California, will discuss “Bridging the Divided City: Preparing Students for a New Los Angeles.” The event is also the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. 

9 a.m. Oct. 4, Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom

Diane Orentlicher, former deputy for war crimes at the U.S. State Department, professor of international law at American University, will discuss “The Role of the ICTY in Understanding War and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Noon Oct. 7, Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom

Lara Bazelon, associate professor of law and director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice & Racial Justice Clinical Programs at University of San Francisco, will give a talk titled “Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction.”

4 p.m. Oct. 16, Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom

Melissa Murray, professor of law and co-faculty director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network at New York University, will discuss “Sex and the Supreme Court.”

7 p.m. Oct. 28, Bauer Hall, Emerson Auditorium

Asma T. Uddin, senior scholar in the Religious Freedom Center at the Freedom Forum Institute in  Washington, will give the lecture “When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom.”

9 a.m. Nov. 9, Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum

Pidgeon Pagonis, intersex activist and filmmaker, will discuss “Increasing Intersex and Non-Binary Awareness.”

Noon Nov. 18, Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom

Michelle Oberman, the Katherine and George Alexander Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, will give a talk titled “Her Body, Our Laws: On the Frontlines of the Abortion War from El Salvador to Oklahoma.”

Earlier this fall, American civil liberties activist Nadine Strossen talked about her book, “Hate”; Nicole Garnett, of the University of Notre Dame, discussed “educational pluralism”; and Washington University constitutional law experts Lee Epstein and Greg Magarian reviewed the 2018-19 Supreme Court term with New York Times journalist Adam Liptak.

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Early rice growers unwittingly gave barnyard grass a big hand, helping to give root to a rice imitator that is now considered one of the world’s worst agricultural weeds.

New research from Zhejiang University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis provides genomic evidence that barnyard grass (Echinochloa crus-galli) benefited from human cultivation practices, including continuous hand weeding, as it spread from the Yangtze River region about 1,000 years ago.

Barnyard grass is a globally common invasive weed of cultivated row crops and cereals. The new study was published Sept. 16 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“In Asia, rice farmers have traditionally planted and weeded their paddies by hand. Any weeds that stick out are easily detected and removed,” said Kenneth Olsen, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences. “Over hundreds of generations, this has selected for some strains of barnyard grass that specialize on rice fields and very closely mimic rice plants. This allows them to escape detection.”

Olsen collaborated on data analyses and interpretation for the new study. He is working with the study’s corresponding author, Longjiang Fan of Zhejiang University, on other research related to rice evolutionary genomics and agricultural weed evolution.

This study sequenced the genomes of rice-mimic and non-mimic forms of the weed as a step towards understanding how this process has occurred.

This form of mimicry, called Vavilovian mimicry, is an adaptation of weeds to mimic domesticated plants. In the case of barnyard grass, the rice mimics grow upright like a rice plant instead of sprawling along the ground like most barnyard grass. They also have green stems like rice plants instead of the red stems more commonly found in the weed.

“With the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, humans all over the planet began creating a wonderful habitat for naturally weedy plant species to exploit,” Olsen said. “The most successful and aggressive agricultural weeds were those that evolved traits allowing them to escape detection and proliferate in this fertile new environment.”

The researchers estimate that the mimic version of E. crus-galli emerged at about the same time that Chinese historical records indicate that the regional economic center was shifting from the Yellow River basin to the Yangtze River basin. During this period of the Song Dynasty, human populations were growing rapidly, demand for rice as the staple grain was paramount. This is also the time when a quick-maturing, drought-resistant variety of rice called Champa rice was introduced to the Yangtze basin from Southeast Asia — to allow two harvests in a year. Weed management in paddies might have been intensified in the context of these conditions.

However, while common barnyard grass is a major agricultural weed in the U.S., the rice mimic form has never become widespread in the main rice growing region — the southern Mississippi valley.

Olsen speculates that this is because U.S. rice farmers rely on mechanized farming instead of hand labor.

“Without farmers out in the fields planting and weeding by hand, there’s not such strong selection for weeds to visually blend in with the rice crop,” he said.

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Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis appear to have solved a decades-long mystery regarding the precise biochemical pathway leading to a fatal genetic disorder in children that results in seizures, developmental regression and death, usually around age 3. Studying a mouse model with the same human illness — called Krabbe disease — the researchers also identified a possible therapeutic strategy.

The research is published Sept. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Patients with infantile globoid cell leukodystrophy, also known as Krabbe disease, gradually lose the protective covering that insulates axons, the wiring of the nervous system. The rare condition — affecting about 1 in 100,000 births — is typically diagnosed before age 1 and progresses rapidly.

Scientists long have suspected that nerve insulation is destroyed in this disorder because of a buildup of a toxic compound called psychosine. Patients with the inherited disorder are missing an important protein involved in breaking down psychosine. But the source of psychosine in Krabbe disease has been elusive, making the problem impossible to correct.

“Krabbe disease in infancy is invariably fatal,” said senior author Mark S. Sands, professor of medicine. “It’s a heartbreaking neurodegenerative disease first described more than a century ago, but we still have no effective treatments. For almost 50 years, we have assumed the psychosine hypothesis was correct — that a toxic buildup of psychosine is the cause of all the problems. But we’ve never been able to prove it.”

Surprisingly, Sands and his team, led by graduate student Yedda Li, proved the psychosine hypothesis correct by, essentially, giving the mice another lethal genetic disease.

The scientists showed that mice harboring genetic mutations resulting in Krabbe disease and Farber disease, a lethal condition that results from the loss of a different protein, have no signs of Krabbe disease. The missing protein in Farber disease is called acid ceramidase, and when it is gone, psychosine does not build up, effectively curing Krabbe disease in mice that otherwise would have it.

“We did not expect these mice to survive through embryonic development with the genetic alterations that cause both Farber disease and Krabbe disease,” Sands said. “We felt it was likely that the combination of these genetic problems would be lethal to the mouse embryo, or at least cause some combination of the problems characteristic of both diseases. Not only were the mice alive, we found that they did not have Krabbe disease — despite having the causal genetics — and we tested them for it in every way imaginable. It was shocking.”

Without the toxic buildup of psychosine, Krabbe disease did not develop in these mice, proving the 50-year-old hypothesis.

After identifying acid ceramidase as the trigger of the toxic buildup of psychosine, Sands and his colleagues gave mice with Krabbe disease a drug known to be an acid ceramidase inhibitor. The drug, carmofur, is a common chemotherapy used to treat cancer. The drug modestly extended the lives of mice with a model of Krabbe disease.

“Carmofur is quite toxic by itself, so it would never be used as a treatment for this disease, but we did show a modest therapeutic benefit,” Sands said. “The research demonstrates a proof-of-concept that we can inhibit acid ceramidase with a drug and it will relieve some of the symptoms of Krabbe disease. We will need to strike a balance, though, because inhibiting it too much will cause Farber disease.”

Sands said he hopes researchers specializing in drug development will begin working toward a safe and effective acid ceramidase inhibitor for this disorder.

This work was supported by BioMarin Pharmaceutical; the Taylor Institute; the Inaugural Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer (MACC) Fund Endowed Chair; and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers NS100779, HL007088, HD087011, HD02528, P30DK020579 and P30DK056341.

Li Y, et al. Genetic ablation of acid ceramidase in Krabbe disease confirms the psychosine hypothesis and identifies a new therapeutic target. PNAS. Sept. 16, 2019.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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If an aeronautical engineer wants to make sure a plane stays steady in the air, she might first build a computational model, feeding into it variables such as information about the plane’s weight or the thrust that can be achieved, together with the laws of aerodynamics, which account for how a plane moves through the air.

She can then build a controller — a program designed to monitor and regulate the system. In this case, the system is the airplane and the surrounding atmosphere. The controller receives information from sensors on the plane, and then continuously and fully automatically makes necessary adjustments to meet a goal. If the plane is pitching down, the controller compensates, directing the plane to pull up its nose.

A biological system might be understood in the same way: a brain might be modeled by its neural connections the speed at which neurons fire. And there are controllers. Hormones are released according to brain states in order to meet a goal (such as the release of cortisol to manage blood pressure).

Can systems engineers, then, use control theory to better understand the workings of the brain?

Not in the traditional sense, according to Shen Zeng, assistant professor of electrical ＆ systems engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Such a task is feasible if your system is not too complicated,” Zeng said. But a biological system such a brain or a cell is complicated. Even if it could be reproduced as a model, that model would be too big and too complicated to design a feedback control system.

Zeng and Jr-Shin Li, professor of electrical & systems engineering, have been developing a new, data- and computationally-driven method to understand and bring under control more complex systems. They have recently received a $488,811 grant from the National Science Foundation for projects focused on the analyzing and controlling aspects in the dynamics of the brain and cancer cells populations.

Traditionally, systems engineers first build a model of the system they are working on. Only then do they move on to the controllers, programs that rely on feedback to continuously monitor the state of the system and adjust according to the desired outcome.

This method is not perfect, but it works well when the system is something like an airplane with well-understood underlying rules — aerodynamics, laws of motion, etc. In a more complex system such as a brain, however, it’s a different story.

“Even if a model could be built,” Zeng said, “it would be very detailed and large, but also so complicated that you won’t be able to do feedback control design with it.”

“Also, in many scientific domains conducting research on highly complex systems, researchers trust their data much more than any mathematical model,” Li said. Therefore, instead, Li and Zeng are developing a novel, more holistic data-driven approach to analyzing complex dynamical systems and designing control mechanisms.

They can do that because of the vast amounts of data now available; data in the form of brain scans, improved microscopy and other high tech innovations. They plan to use this data along with a kind of generic, or primitive model they have developed, and build control methodologies while at the same time, building out and enhancing the model.

“It will be the data and models informing each other,” Zeng said. The more data, the more powerful and precise the model may be established. With a more powerful model, Li and Zeng will be able to design more effective and holistic controllers. Along the way, they expect to also uncover new, fundamental principles about systems design — new control design paradigms, for example.

And there might be another benefit.

A model of an airplane is based on those principles that underlie the system, but researchers know of nothing as certain or comprehensive when it comes to more complex, biological systems, like a brain.

But if such principles exist, the data is beholden to them nonetheless.

Marrying massive quantities of data with their model has the potential to draw out these as-of-yet-unknown principles, shedding light on biological fundamentals through systems engineering.

“Of course we like to build upon knowledge and use fundamental principles,” Zeng said, “but sometimes there are limits. There are places we cannot get to just from looking at fundamental things. But data, that can take us to uncharted territory.”

The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 98 tenured/tenure-track and 38 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 1,200 graduate students and 20,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

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The Prevention Research Center (PRC) at Washington University in St. Louis has been awarded a $3.8 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lead a broad effort to better practice evidence-based policies to improve health.

The five-year grant will fund the PRC’s administrative core, as well as its own research project aimed at reducing obesity.

The PRC is made up of practice, policy, community and academic partners who work together across disciplines using their expertise in applying proven research to prevent chronic diseases and promote health among diverse populations.

“Our center and research project address behaviors like exercise and healthy eating that have a big impact on the burden of cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases,” said the center’s founder and director, Ross Brownson, the Steven H. and Susan U. Lipstein Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and a prominent leader in the field of evidence-based public health.

The center’s core research project will focus on ways to persuade elected and appointed local officials to adopt policies proven to reduce obesity, particularly among low-income families where the problem is the greatest. The PRC will use a “team science” approach that will involve scholars and a community advisory committee representing many disciplines. The project aims to:

• Describe the use of evidence-based policies in 200 communities with obesity disparities.
• Test the effectiveness of different kinds of policy briefs to gain support from 320 local policymakers in a randomized trial.
• Test the effect of tailored implementation strategies to address obesity in 20 communities with different social-network structures.

The PRC will use the results to evaluate the best ways to communicate research to policymakers and to different communities, then make recommendations for doing so.

“Not enough is known about the most effective ways to put research-tested policies into effect, and our work will provide strategies to do this for a variety of health risks in different settings,” Brownson said. “Our study will be among the first to describe the role of narrative communication in shaping local policy and help to better define the local policy process.”

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The inauguration of Andrew D. Martin as the 15th chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 3 will begin with a faculty symposium that explores connections between research and discovery as well as connections to the St. Louis community at large.

The symposium begins at 9 a.m. in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium on the Danforth Campus, beginning with opening remarks by Martin and Lee Epstein, the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor and a co-chair of the Inauguration Symposium Sub-Committee.

“On the occasion of Chancellor Martin’s inauguration, it seems very fitting that we would give our faculty an opportunity to showcase their research and important work in the lab, in the field and in the St. Louis region,” Epstein said. “In the context of the inaugural theme of ‘Momentum,’ these presentations will inspire us to think about where we are, and where we are going — as individuals and as an institution.

“The symposium promises to be a thought-provoking glimpse into our collective impact and shared vision as we head into the Martin era,” Epstein said.

The symposium will be presented in two parts beginning at 9:15 a.m., with five faculty members giving seven-minute presentations on their research and the ways it contributes to the university’s momentum. After a short break, the second session will feature similar talks by eight faculty focusing on their work making connections and partnerships within the St. Louis community.

The faculty participants giving presentations on research are:

• Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, “Development of Microbiota-directed Foods for Treatment of Childhood Malnutrition”;
• Heather Corcoran, the Halsey C. Ives Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; “Visualization of Time”;
• Fred Ssewamala, the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor at the Brown School, “Global Work in Sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities for Scientific Researchers”;
• Hong Chen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, “Two-way Transfer Across the Blood-Brain Barrier”; and
• John Bowen, the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of sociocultural anthropology, “How Muslims, Like the Rest of Us, Adapt to New Worlds.”

The faculty members giving presentations on St. Louis connections are:

• Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School, “HomeGrown StL: Scaling Impact with Community Partners”;
• Bettina F. Drake, associate director of community outreach and engagement for Siteman Cancer Center and professor of surgery in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the School of Medicine, “Cancer: Eliminating Disparities, Promoting Prevention”;
• Joe Scherrer, interim executive director of the Henry Edwin Sever Institute at the McKelvey School of Engineering and director of the Cybersecurity Strategic Initiative, “Cyber(UN)Security”;
• Neil Richards, the Koch Distinguished Professor of Law at the School of Law, and Jonathan Heusel, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and immunology and chief medical officer for Genomics and Pathology Services at the School of Medicine, “The Future of Human Data in Healthcare & Beyond”;
• Peter Boumgarden, professor of practice, strategy and organizations at Olin Business School, “Experiential Impact”; and
• Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration in the Sam Fox School, “The Divided City.”

Remote viewing locations will be available in the Eric P. Newman Education Center on the Medical Campus and in the Jerzewiak Family Auditorium in Wrighton Hall on the Danforth Campus. The symposium also will be available via livestream on the inauguration website.

For more information, visit the symposium page of the inauguration website.

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Aiming to encourage and inspire more physicians to develop careers that blend scientific research with patient care, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) has announced that Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will receive a prestigious, $2.5 million Physician-Scientist Institutional Award.

The award — of which only 10 have been given, five of them this year — is intended to help medical schools create novel programs that enhance the career development of physicians who also want to conduct basic research.

Physician-scientists are considered crucial to developing new therapeutics and approaches to diagnosing and treating disease. But their numbers are declining, with only 1.5% of U.S. physicians today conducting research. While many physician-scientists hold both an MD and a PhD, the new award is targeted to strengthening the research skills of those who have earned only an MD degree.

“Washington University School of Medicine has always been a leader in developing the careers of physician-scientists and has been home to some of the most influential physician-researchers in the history of medicine,” said David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean of the School of Medicine, and the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Distinguished Professor. “The Burroughs Wellcome Fund award recognizes this history and provides additional resources for us to expand and enhance that legacy.”­­

Targeted primarily at MD-only trainees in the School of Medicine’s clinical departments, the award provides seed funding over five years that will help allow for stipends, pilot project funding, loan repayment, mentoring and enrichment activities.

Wayne M. Yokoyama, MD, the Sam and Audrey Loew Levin Professor of Medicine, a highly regarded physician-scientist, will oversee the program as its principal investigator. He also directs the university’s Medical Scientist Training Program, which allows students to earn both an MD and a PhD in a scientific field.

As part of the grant, Yokoyama plans to develop the Interesting Patient Study program, in which medical residents and fellows will be inspired to study patients with complex medical histories and diagnoses alongside basic-science faculty mentors. Further, to address key challenges facing physician trainees, the award will allow for the establishment of the Dean’s Scholar Program, aimed at enhancing such trainees’ scientific preparation and competitiveness, as well as the Community of Academic Physician-Scientists in Training, which will provide events and seminars designed to give trainees a unique identity, networking opportunities, and guidance in navigating their career paths.

“Physician-scientists are critical to medical advancements,” said Yokoyama, who is also a professor of pathology and immunology. “Their research helps to understand the underpinnings of common and rare diseases and illnesses, and to develop new drugs and treatments. However, earning an MD/PhD is not the only way to become a physician-scientist. Many physicians become inspired to conduct research after treating a patient whose condition they want to learn more about, and we intend to foster this interest in our new programs.”

Yokoyama speaks from experience. He does not have a PhD, yet he is internationally recognized for his research on a type of immune cell called natural killer cells.

He and three other faculty members — Melvin S. Blanchard, MD, Misty Good, MD, and Mark E. Lowe, MD, PhD — together applied for the BWF grant on behalf of the School of Medicine.

Blanchard, vice chair for education in the university’s Department of Medicine and director of its Division of Medical Education, co-authored studies in 2018 that detailed a national shortage of physician-scientists and outlined best practices for training physician-scientists.

Compared with MD-only students, there are far fewer MD/PhD students entering medical school, Blanchard said, in part because they need to make an early commitment to the substantial time needed for training, which includes about eight years of combined medical school and PhD training and five to seven years of residency and subspecialty fellowship training. Still, the number of MD/PhD students, many of whom are supported by NIH training grants, has been stable for many years. Thus, the new BWF grant aims to produce more physician-scientists by focusing primarily on the large pool of physicians in the later stages of MD-only training.

Good and Lowe are both physician-scientists who treat patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and receive research funding from the NIH.

Good, an assistant professor of pediatrics, runs a research lab focused on necrotizing enterocolitis, a deadly gastrointestinal disease in newborns. In 2018, she co-authored a study that indicated an overall downward trend in NIH funding for pediatric physician-scientists, particularly among those early in their careers.

Lowe, the Harvey R. Colten Professor of Pediatric Science and the vice chair of clinical affairs and strategic planning in the Department of Pediatrics, is best known for his research on childhood gastroenterological disorders, including acute and chronic pancreatitis in children and dietary fat digestion in infants.

BWF is a nonprofit organization that supports biomedical science through research and education. It is based in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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The Washington University in St. Louis community is invited to join current and former Rodriguez scholars at the unveiling of the Annika Rodriguez 20th Anniversary Mural from 2-3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 21, in the Danforth University Center’s Fun Room. 

Painted by acclaimed local muralist Gonz Jove, the mural invokes the style of Chicanx street art and pays homage to the Latinx roots of the program, which is committed to academic excellence, leadership, service to the community and bringing together diverse communities. 

In that spirit, the mural not only honors the Rodriguez legacy but also other student groups and activists, said Rodriguez scholar Carol Pazos, a senior studying global health and environment in Arts & Sciences. 

“The piece features performers from all of the cultural shows on campus, various community organizers, from Ferguson protestors to historical icons like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, as well as workers and students of color on WashU’s campus,” Pazos said. “The mural represents our shared ideal for the future of WashU, one in which all students are truly included in the process of community building.” 

The unveiling is part of the 20th anniversary celebration, which will draw Rodriguez alumni from across the country.

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Traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have become common in athletes who suffer repeated blows to the head. Most recently, former New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski revealed that he had sustained about 20 concussions during his nine-year career in the National Football League.

Now, a team of researchers nationwide, led by Philip V. Bayly in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, plans to use MRI to study the brains of healthy, uninjured individuals in various age ranges to create models of brain motion over the life span. Their goal is to enable the researchers to predict the chronic effects of repeated head impacts in both men and women. The work is supported by a five-year, $3.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“There is no debate that there are cumulative effects of repeated impacts on the neurophysiology of the brain,” said Bayly, the Lilyan & E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science. “The question is: What are the exact relationships between the mechanical forces and those neurobiological changes, such as the accumulation of tau proteins in different areas, and the resulting changes in behavior.”

In this study, Bayly and the research team plan to obtain MRI scans of teens ages 14 to 17, young adults ages 18 to 22, adults 20 to 50, and adults older than 50. Previous studies have not included such a range in ages, Bayly said.

“The specific focus of this grant is to try to determine the differences mechanically between the response of the adolescent brain, the response of the adult brain and the response of the older brain,” he said. “We are also looking at the differences between the behavior of the male brain and the female brain. There is some evidence that female athletes are at greater risk for injury due to participation in sports, and this should hopefully illuminate to what extent that is due to mechanical differences in the brain.”

By comparing the brains of humans at different stages of life, the researchers can analyze whether the brain is more vulnerable to certain injuries at specific ages. Ultimately, this approach may help to determine when a person who has suffered a brain injury can return to their sport.

For their study, the team will ask healthy human patients with no history of brain injury to undergo a gentle mechanical vibration while having an MRI. Bayly compared the principle to tapping on a melon to test its ripeness. Building on current methods, researchers will expand the range of vibrations given, administer them in different frequencies and from different angles to study the mechanical behavior of the brain and the brain’s interaction with the skull.

The work is relevant beyond athletes and former athletes, Bayly said.

“Something that has also been overlooked, but shouldn’t be, is trauma due to domestic abuse,” he said. “Unfortunately, that is more common in women than in men and hasn’t been part of the public debate as much, but it’s also very important and relevant to acute trauma and chronic effects of repeated trauma.”

Researchers have observed anecdotally that athletes who have one concussion are more likely to have a second and a third, Bayly said. In addition, athletes who begin playing contact sports at an earlier age are more likely to have neurobiological changes than those who began playing later.

“There have been these observations that have been pieced together, but the picture is really so far from complete that there are very compelling reasons to study it,” Bayly said.

Joining Bayly on the research team are Jerry Prince, the William B. Kouwenhoven Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and KT Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering, both at Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering; Curtis Johnson, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Delaware; and Dzung Pham, senior scientist at the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine.

The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 98 tenured/tenure-track and 38 additional full-time faculty, 1,361 undergraduate students, 1,291 graduate students and 21,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

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Cindy A. Brantmeier, professor of applied linguistics and education in Arts & Sciences, has been selected to serve as the first faculty fellow in international research at Washington University in St. Louis.

In her new role serving faculty on the Danforth and Medical campuses, Brantmeier will advise faculty on conducting international research and achieving effective collaborations with international partners that are compliant with university policies and regulatory requirements and procedures.

Brantmeier was named to the new post by Jennifer K. Lodge, the university’s vice chancellor for research.

“I am thrilled to have Cindy as our inaugural international research faculty fellow,” said Lodge, also the associate dean for research and a professor of molecular microbiology at the School of Medicine. “She will provide much-needed support and advice to our faculty who want to conduct research abroad by offering guidance on study procedures, recruitment of participants and informed consent, protocol training for on-site individuals, to name a few. Cindy will assist faculty in thinking through the best approach to making the research process efficient while simultaneously following the necessary regulatory requirements for conducting research abroad and at Washington University. Cindy also will advise university leadership on new matters affecting international research involving patients and other people as study subjects.”

Brantmeier, who is in her 20th year at the university, has decades of experience in conducting global research with people of diverse languages and cultures, and is an expert in International Institutional Review Board research protocol. She has conducted research or participated on research teams around the world, including in Nicaragua, China, Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Malaysia, England, Norway and the Republic of Georgia.

Navigating international partnerships and regulations around international research can present a variety of challenging issues, including how to identify appropriate translators and cultural reviewers; understand country-specific laws and regulations around data collection instruments and procedures; transport and store consent forms and data; apply research identification standards; and conduct research at international sites that do not have institutional review boards or equivalent ethics committees.

“Protecting the rights and welfare of linguistically and culturally diverse human subjects in research, while advancing science, has always been an interest of mine,” Brantmeier said. “I am inspired to share my knowledge, learn a lot more and work in partnership with scholars and institutional support systems to promote research integrity. I am humbled by the confidence that Dr. Lodge and her colleagues have in me.”

Brantmeier will hold meetings at her Danforth Campus office in 135 Seigle Hall and travel to the Medical Campus to meet with faculty in their offices.

Originally published by the School of Medicine 

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Certain human gut microbes with links to health thrive when fed specific types of ingredients in dietary fibers, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The work — conducted in mice colonized with human gut bacteria and using new technologies for measuring nutrient processing — is a step toward developing more nutritious foods based on a strategy of targeted enrichment of key members of gut microbial communities. The researchers identified fibers that selectively increase the abundance of beneficial microbes and tracked down the bioactive components of fibers responsible for their effects. To decipher how members of gut communities compete or cooperate with each other for these fiber ingredients, they also invented a type of artificial food particle that acts as a biosensor for monitoring nutrient processing within the intestine.

The study appears Sept. 19 in the journal Cell.

“We are in the midst of a revolution in food science – where the naturally occurring molecules present in various food staples are being identified using advanced analytic tools,” said senior author Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor, director of the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology and leader of the current study. “The resulting encyclopedias of food ingredients are providing an opportunity to understand how gut microbes are able to detect and transform these ingredients to products they use to satisfy their own needs, as well as share with us. Cracking the code of what dietary ingredients beneficial microbes covet is a key to designing foods that enhance health.”

Dietary fiber is known to promote health, but typical Western diets are lacking in high-fiber fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes. Fibers contain very diverse and complex collections of molecules. The specific components of various fibers that are used by gut bacteria and confer health benefits are generally not known. Since the human genome possesses a very limited arsenal of genes that break down dietary fiber, and many gut bacterial species are chock full of these genes, people depend on gut microbes to digest fiber.

In an effort to understand which types of fiber promote the representation of different types of beneficial microbes in the human gut, and the nature of their active ingredients, the researchers screened 34 types of fiber provided by the food company Mondelez International. Their list included fibers often discarded during food manufacturing, such as fruit and vegetable peels and grain husks.

The researchers began by colonizing mice raised under sterile conditions with a collection of gut bacteria species they had cultured from a healthy human. The genomes of these organisms were sequenced to inventory their genes. Groups of mice containing this model human gut community initially were fed a base human diet high in saturated fats and low in fiber. Next, the researchers screened 144 derivative diets containing different types and amounts of fiber supplements. The investigators monitored the effects of the added fibers on levels of members of the model gut community, as well as expression of the proteins encoded by their genomes.

“Microbes are master teachers,” Gordon said. “The microbial genes that respond to the different fibers provided an important clue as to what kinds of molecules in a given type of fiber a given community member preferred to consume.”

Said first author Michael L. Patnode, a postdoctoral researcher in Gordon’s lab: “Our screen identified food-grade fibers that selectively affected different species belonging to a group of bacteria known as Bacteroides. Our experiments showed that in pea fiber, the active molecular constituents included a type of polysaccharide called arabinan, whereas in citrus pectin recovered from orange peels, another type of polysaccharide called homogalacturonan was responsible for expansion of the bacteria.”

The researchers uncovered interactions between gut bacterial species that help explain the selective effects of fibers on Bacteroides species. It turns out that some of the Bacteroides in their community directly compete with each other to consume components of dietary fibers, while others defer to their neighbors. Understanding these relationships is important for developing foods that are optimally processed by different microbial populations that live together in the gut, according to the researchers.

To dissect these relationships, Patnode created artificial food particles consisting of different types of magnetic, microscopic glass beads. Each type contained a given fiber-derived polysaccharide bound to the bead’s surface together with a given type of bound fluorescent label. The collection of different bead types was introduced simultaneously into the intestines of different groups of mice colonized with the human gut microbial community — with or without intentional omission of one or more of its Bacteroides members. Food particles then were recovered after passage through the intestines of these animals, and the amount of polysaccharide remaining on the particles surfaces was measured.

“These artificial food particles acted as biosensors, allowing us to decipher how inclusion or omission of Bacteroides influenced the community’s ability to process the different polysaccharides present on the different beads,” Patnode said. “Moreover, we were able to monitor fiber degradation in different diet contexts.”

Gordon noted that nutrient-containing artificial food particles could not only be used as biosensors to define the functional capabilities of a person’s microbial community, but also could help food scientists develop methods for producing more nutritious foods containing different combinations of health-promoting bioactive fiber components.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers DK070977, DK078669 and F32DK107158; Mondelez International; and the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), grant number DE-SC0015662.

Gordon is a co-founder of Matatu Inc., a company characterizing the role of diet-by-microbiota interactions in animal health.

Patnode ML, Beller ZW, Han ND, Cheng J, Peters SL, Terrapon N, Henrissat B, Le Gall S, Saulnier L, Hayashi DK, Meynier A, Vinoy S, Giannone RJ, Hettich RL, Gordon JI. Interspecies competition impacts targeted manipulation of human gut bacteria by fiber-derived glycans. Cell. Sept. 19, 2019.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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Go ahead, look in the mirror and admit it: If you are middle aged, you probably aren’t as self-centered as you used to be. The reason isn’t merely maturity from the intervening years since college, but you may have life experiences such as your relationships, your family and your career to generally thank for this change.

In a study co-authored by a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School, a survey that began with Generation X college students in 1992 and revisited when they were around age 41 finds that overall narcissism declined over time — as did the three narcissism components: vanity, leadership and entitlement.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, surveyed 237 of the original 486 participants and found out how the lives of narcissistic people from the days of “A League of Their Own” and President Bill Clinton’s first term turned out — if, say, many indeed went from Boyz II Men.

“Maturity here is considered in social terms — a more pleasant and productive citizen in a society,” said Emily Grijalva, professor of organizational behavior at Olin.

She was a co-principal investigator on the study. Her co-authors included Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where Grijalva earned her PhD; Richard Robins of the University of California, Davis;  and Eunike Wetzel of Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, who served as the other co-principal investigator.

“Past work has supported the argument that people tend to mature over time by showing that they generally become more conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable — less anxious and depressed — from young adulthood to middle age. Our findings are relevant because narcissism is really the antithesis of maturity,” Grijalva said.

Among other findings from the survey: Narcissism overall, and vanity, leadership and entitlement in particular, all saw a decline over the roughly quarter-century between the first examination, when Roberts and Robins were doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley, and the re-examination 23 years later. Only 3% actually showed an increase in narcissism over that span, Wetzel said, and “some remained just as narcissistic at age 41 as they had been when they were 18 years old.”

One of these results surprised the researchers, who had expected to see an increase in the leadership component of narcissism, but found a decrease.

“In fairness to my co-authors, that hypothesis was mine, and it turns out I was wrong,” said Roberts, who noted how leadership is considered one of the least pathological elements of narcissism.

“We know from past research that another component of personality, assertiveness, tends to increase during this time of life,” Roberts said. “So, I thought it was reasonable to hypothesize a similar increase in the leadership facet. This either means the past research is wrong, or our read of the leadership component of narcissism is wrong — it may actually be more negative than we thought. We have to figure this out in future research.”

The researchers also examined the types of life events people experienced. Participants who were vain at age 18 were more likely to divorce, had fewer children and had more unstable relationships. On the other hand, they also reported better health after 40. One interpretation is that vanity may promote a concern with physical attractiveness, and, in turn, healthy habits such as going to the gym and eating healthy. In this way, vanity has mixed outcomes — it is associated with better physical health, but less successful romantic relationships, Grijalva said.

Personality not only predicts the occurrence of life events, but life events can affect the trajectory of change in personality. “We found, for example, that having children and being in an intimate relationship were related to stronger decreases in vanity,” Grijalva said. But when relationships failed, vanity levels tended to decrease less.

When considering work-related outcomes, “Narcissistic young adults were more likely to end up in supervisory jobs 23 years later, suggesting that selfish, arrogant individuals are rewarded with more powerful organizational roles,” added Grijalva, who completed the project while working at the University of Buffalo prior to joining Olin in 2019.

“Further, individuals who supervised others decreased less in narcissism from young adulthood to middle age — meaning that supervisory roles helped to maintain prior levels of narcissism,” she said.

Entitlement is a word a layman associates with the much-maligned millenial generation, more so than Generation X, who grew up with the music of Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Rage Against the Machine.

“Interestingly, people often presume millennials are more entitled and narcissistic than previous generations, but there is a lot of research evidence showing that this simply is not the case,” Grijalva said. “It appears that older generations assume young people are more narcissistic because their own narcissism levels naturally declined over time — leaving them currently less narcissistic than young people — and they have forgotten how narcissistic they used to be when they were young.”

Wetzel added that she, Roberts and Robins worked on the generational aspect in a previous project. “We already published a paper together showing that the popular perception that young adults today are more narcissistic than young adults of prior generations is incorrect,” Wetzel said. “The current study showing that, on average, people decrease in narcissism from young adulthood to middle age is kind of a follow-up study.”

The entitled folks of Gen X, this study revealed, were more prone than the vanity or leadership segments to endure what they ranked as negative life events and to grow into people with lower life satisfaction and well-being — and those with higher entitlement tended to have larger body mass index.

Even though the study group came from Cal students — who earned twice the national average and went on to earn a terminal degree 64% of the time — the co-authors expect that the tendency for narcissism to decrease from young adulthood to middle age is relatively robust. Could scientists return in another quarter-century or so to survey this group again, while it approaches retirement age?

“There is a dearth of this kind of research with older adults,” Grijalva said.

The University of Illinois news release contributed to this report; it is available here.

Grijalva is available at egrijalva@wustl.edu, Wetzel at eunike.wetzel@ovgu.de and Roberts at bwrobrts@illinois.edu

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Washington University in St. Louis, as a partner institution in the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), will be on the forefront of unprecedented water research and management thanks to the new Energy-Water Desalination Hub, a $100 million Department of Energy (DOE) effort to address water security issues.

The Hub will focus on early-stage research and development of desalination technologies and treating non-traditional water sources — such as seawater, brackish water, and produced waters — for municipal, industrial, agricultural and other uses.

Daniel Giammar, the Walter E. Browne Professor of Environmental Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, is Washington University’s NAWI representative.

“The sustainable use of energy and water are both critical challenges for the nation, and the uses of these two resources are tightly connected,” Giammar said. “I am excited to see the Department of Energy investing in a high impact project that can increase the availability of clean water while decreasing the energy required for its production.”

Washington University’s initial role will focus on the downstream impacts of desalination. Giammar was invited to join the team because of his expertise investigating distribution system water quality. During the initial road-mapping of the project, Giammar will be a lead cartographer, identifying challenges and research needs associated with the recovery and reuse of municipal wastewater.

The NAWI is a public-private partnership headquartered at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. It includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, 19 university partners and 10 industry partners.

The alliance’s goal is to enable the manufacturing of lower cost, high quality, energy-efficient desalination technology and while reducing the environmental impact for 90% of non-traditional water sources within the next 10 years.

Read more on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory website.

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Voter turnout among Washington University in St. Louis students leaped to 41.8% in the 2018 midterm elections, more than double the 2014 midterm voting rate of 15.9%, according to a national study of campus voting rates by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education.

Nationwide, the average campus voting rate was 39.1%, double the 2014 rate. The study is based on the voting records of more than 10 million students at more than 1,000 colleges and universities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The university went from trailing the national average to surpassing it because of its dual commitment to both registration and turnout, said Stephanie Kurtzman, the Peter G. Sortino Director of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement.

“We didn’t stop at registering students,” Kurtzman said. “We also put a lot of energy into making sure voters were informed, educated and prepared for Election Day. That meant making sure voters knew the location of their polling place, that they understood the absentee voting procedures and deadlines in their home state and that they had a plan for voting on Election Day.”

Other efforts included the establishment in 2016  of a single polling place at the Athletic Complex for students living on campus; registration drives at every graduate and professional school; policy panels that featured an ideologically diverse array of experts; and Election Day festivities and watch parties.

“There was a high level of energy on campus on Election Day,” Kurtzman said. “That is, of course, a reflection of the historic nature of the 2018 elections. We have also worked hard to create a culture of  civic engagement that extends beyond Election Day.”

The study also broke down voting rates by course of study. Washington University students in all academic categories, as defined by the study, turned out at higher rates than in 2014. The disciplines with the highest turnout rates were public administration and social service professions (51.3%); education (47.2%); history (44.1%); English language and literature (43.4%); and area, ethnic, cultural, gender and group studies (42.9%).

Despite gains, college students still vote at lower rates than the general population. According to the U.S. census, 53% of the voting-age population voted in 2018. Kurtzman hopes to continue increasing voter turnout and engagement through the institute’s Engage Democracy initiative, which aims to educate the campus community about the processes and civic skills needed to participate in a thriving democracy.

“Yes, more students are voting, but what about the rest of students?” Kurtzman asked. “We want to increase our 2020 voting rates beyond our successful rates in 2018 and 2016, and we also aim to give students the tools to continue as engaged citizens well beyond Election Day.”

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Francis Field, the venerable stadium on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis that was the site of the first Olympiad in the Western Hemisphere, was rededicated Sept. 21 as Francis Olympic Field.

The new name, sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, recognizes the stadium’s role as the main venue for the 1904 Olympic games and represents another milestone in securing Washington University’s — and St. Louis’ — legacy in the Olympic movement.

“We are extremely honored and proud to rename this field Francis Olympic Field as an official recognition of that historic moment and this field’s continued use,” Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said in a ceremony at halftime of the Washington University Bears football game against North Central College, in front of a crowd estimated to be close to 2,000 students, parents, alumni and friends.

“But today, we don’t just celebrate one historic moment,” Martin said. “We also celebrate the Olympic movement and spirit that has continued to take hold in this community ever since the Olympic Games were held here.”

Francis Olympic Field, completed in 1904 for the Olympic Games, is home to the university’s football team, as well as men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross-country and men’s and women’s track and field teams. It is the oldest modern Olympic stadium still in active use.

The renaming is yet another result of a partnership between the St. Louis Sports Commission and Washington University to promote St. Louis’ Olympic legacy. In September 2018, an Olympic five-ring “Spectacular” was unveiled just northeast of the stadium at the end of Olympian Way.  The 16-by-9-foot stainless steel structure sits on a block of granite and has become a popular photo op and meeting place on the Danforth Campus.

This time, the sign atop the historic Francis Field gates was refabricated with the new name, a distinction unique because of all the venues in the United States that have held Olympic competitions, only Francis Field has been given permission to include “Olympic” in its name. The press box also was repainted to reflect the new moniker and include the five interlaced Olympic rings.

But if last year’s Olympic dedication on campus was “spectacular,” this year it was gold — in the form of a replica gold medal from the 1904 Olympics presented to Martin.

Following a short video history of the St. Louis 1904 games narrated by broadcaster Bob Costas, the chancellor was presented with the medal representing the 1904 games as the first to award gold, silver and bronze medals to athletes.

Washington University alumnus Michael Loynd, JD ’99, a local attorney who has spearheaded the effort as chairman of the Sports Commission’s Olympic Legacy Committee, also made remarks and presented the medal to Martin.

A number of St. Louis-area Olympians participated in the halftime ceremony. They were:  soccer players John Carenza and Ty Keough; speedskaters Jim Chapin and Brendan Eppert; weightlifter Derrick Crass; triathlete Sarah Haskins; figure skater Stacey Smith; and Michelle Venturella, Washington University head softball coach and a member of the 2000 gold medal-winning softball team. Frank Viverito, president of the St. Louis Sports Commission, was also on hand, as was Lori White, vice chancellor for student affairs, who is known to be a huge sports fan.

“I love the Olympic Games,” White said, “and I am so excited that we have formally commemorated Francis Olympic Field, which will now be forever associated with other hallowed Olympic stadiums including the Los Angeles Coliseum where, like this one, I have attended many football games.

“It’s great to celebrate both where the Olympic movement began in the United States, and our scholar champions on the field.”

Read more about Francis Olympic Field and the dedication on the BearSports website.

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To learn more about the green wall, hover over the image. (All photos: James Byard/Washington University)

Colors and textures swirl like paint strokes. More than 5,000 plants — from Kangaroo Paw Fern and chlorophytum “Ocean” to arboricola “mini green” and philodendron cordatum — form a literal wall of green that rises 30 feet in the air.

Welcome to the Kuehner Court, located in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ new Anabeth and John Weil Hall. With its clean lines, high ceilings and abundant natural light, the court — completed as part of Washington University in St. Louis’ east end project, which will be formally dedicated Oct. 2 — is a welcoming spot for students and faculty to meet, study, relax and recharge.

“I was inspired by the geography of St. Louis,” said Nathan Beckner, lead plant designer at Sagegreenlife, which developed the green wall in collaboration with architecture firm KieranTimberlake. “The Mississippi and Missouri are such iconic rivers. I wanted to incorporate that river patterning as well as a sense of topography and narrative.”

Beckner said that numerous studies have confirmed the benefits of “biophilic design,” which strives to better integrate the natural and built environments. (The term was popularized by biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1984 book “Biophilia.”) These benefits range from noise abatement and improved mental health to the way plants help moderate temperature and purify the air.

“Everything changes,” Beckner said. “The smell of the room, the sound of it — plants change your perception of the space. Plants improve productivity, wellness and quality of life. People have fewer sick days.

“They’re really kind of a miracle product.”

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Eleven-year-olds know a lot about love. First-generation immigrants know too much about discomfort. Husbands know too little about wives, but singers know everything about timing. And nobody knows anything about walking down the aisle.

With “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo,” senior Sophie Tegenu explores themes of family, romantic love and the difficulties of saying “I do.”  This weekend, “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo” will receive its world-premiere staged reading at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the annual A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival.

In this Q&A, Tegenu discusses “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo,” the playwriting process and the pitfalls of romantic comedies.

What’s your background in drama? What do you find most rewarding about it? What’s most difficult?

I was in the chorus of “Guys and Dolls” my freshman year of high school, but that was about the extent of my drama experience before WashU. I took Carter W. Lewis’ “Introduction to Playwriting” course the fall of my junior year and really fell in love with the class. I’m an English literature major and love writing, but I felt like I wasn’t doing any creative writing in my course load, so Carter’s class was a really wonderful way to get back into creative writing.

The most rewarding part of drama/playwriting for me is seeing the words that were in my head performed out loud. It’s just so exhilarating and it feels like the work takes on a life of its own. The most difficult part is probably the same thing. It’s intensely vulnerable to have something you’ve worked on, and care so much about, put out into the world in such a public way.

 Tell me about “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo.” What’s the play about? What inspired you to write it?

“Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo” is the story of a woman who doesn’t believe in marriage but somehow finds herself engaged. She is Ethiopian and her fiancé is white, leading to the inevitable family drama and culture clash. Her 11-year-old brother, Nate, is in love with a girl from school, and his love story plays out alongside his sister’s.

I love romantic comedies, so I wanted to write one. But I think rom-coms often have tremendously negative effects on girls’ understanding/perception of love. They make romantic love the center of the world and reinforce the messaging that male attention should be the ultimate priority.

I wanted to write a rom-com about someone who is grappling with her desire for marriage and a conventionally happy life and with her deep-rooted suspicion of the institution. I also really wanted to see the type of representation that I never saw growing up, so it was important for me to write about people of color.

What’s been the biggest surprise or lesson about writing for the stage?

Writing drama is really structurally challenging for me, in a way that differs from writing prose or poetry. Hearing the work out loud begs the question “What’s the point?” Why does this scene exist in the order that it does, why is the character saying this thing rather than that thing?

With prose or poetry, sometimes you write to get some sense of meandering beauty. Which is not to say that drama can’t be meanderingly beautiful, but that it needs to be purposeful and timely. There’s also the anticipation of a live audience that affects the writing.

What sounds good is different from what reads well.

About the Hotchner Festival

The A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival begins at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27, with Elizabeth Brown’s “You Don’t Live Here Anymore,” directed by William Whitaker, professor of the practice in drama.

The festival continues at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, with Kelly Minster’s “This House,” directed by Henry I. Schvey, professor of drama and of comparative literature. The festival will conclude at 7 p.m. that evening with Tegenu’s “Mrs. Kelley’s Igloo,” directed by Paige McGinley, associate professor and director of graduate studies for theater and performance studies.

Sponsored by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, the festival is named for alumnus A.E. Hotchner, who famously bested Tennessee Williams in a campus playwriting competition. The festival is coordinated by Lewis, senior playwright-in-residence. Guest dramaturg is Jenni Werner, literary director and resident dramaturg at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, N.Y.

All readings are free and open to the public and take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call 314-935-5858, visit pad.artsci.wustl.edu or follow the PAD on Facebook.

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Plenty of workplace research shows that people with helpful, mentoring colleagues tend to be helpful and perform better themselves. Few researchers have looked at whether bad behavior spreads among workplace colleagues.

But now, three researchers from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis have completed a study of workplace theft among restaurant workers that details, for the first time, how such stealing is contagious — and new restaurant workers are particularly susceptible.

“It is definitely worse than our data shows,” said Tat Chan, professor of marketing at Olin. Chan and his colleagues studied an extraordinary database looking at millions of restaurant transactions, but the algorithm it used took a conservative approach to flagging theft.

While thieves tend to influence other workers to steal, the research team also found that peers are strategic about when to use their sticky fingers: If Bob is stealing a lot today, they’ll say, we’d better not steal — or everyone will get caught.

To reach their conclusions, researchers studied seven years’ worth of data from a restaurant point-of-sale equipment distributor, covering 1,049 locations from 34 different casual dining restaurant chains in 46 states. The database included more than 5.7 million transactions involving more than 83,000 servers.

Peer influence of bad actors

The researchers used the data to gauge whether misconduct among workers spreads to coworkers. Their paper, “The Influence of Peers in Worker Misconduct: Evidence from Restaurant Theft,” is forthcoming in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

“Bad apples with high levels of misconduct are even more costly than their individual behavior,” the authors wrote, because those bad apples negatively influence their peers to commit similar bad acts.

Chan collaborated with Olin’s Lamar Pierce, professor of organization and strategy, and Yijun Chen, a PhD student, along with Daniel Snow from Saïd Business School at Oxford University.

Among the findings: If new restaurant workers are exposed to stealing peers within the first five months of starting their job, they also are likely to become habitual thieves.

“One important thing we show is that people learn from peers,” Chan said. “To make sure employees do not learn stealing from their peers, it’s important to influence them in the first few months. If they don’t know what the typical conduct is, but they see their peers steal, they will follow.”

Industry scourge

The data they reviewed relied on sophisticated algorithms to flag when a transaction likely sparked misconduct. Several schemes in the industry are notorious, including “the wagon wheel scam,” in which servers transfer an item from one customer’s bill to another who ordered the same thing. Once the first customer pays the original bill, the server reprints it without the item and pockets the difference.

Other schemes involve “comping” or refunding a meal — or voiding a transaction entirely — after the customer has paid, but before the ticket is closed.

The practices are well-known among industry insiders. Media reports have cited National Restaurant Association estimates saying theft accounts for 4% of restaurant costs. The U.S. restaurant market is projected to earn about $863 billion this year.

Digging through the data, the team’s research found that fully 56% of servers in the database committed identifiable theft at least once. Through computer simulations with the data, they found that doubling a single worker’s average theft amount would yield a 76% increase in a restaurant’s average loss to theft.

Not all restaurants rely on point-of-sale systems that flag potential incidents of theft. Additionally, those systems tend to err on the side of giving servers the autonomy to correct a customer’s bill or provide a free drink as compensation for a service issue. But the team’s research indicated that managerial oversight does reduce theft.

“It’s not just to catch stealing,” Chan said. “People will restrain their stealing behavior themselves if they know they are being monitored.”

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In mapping his vision for the future of Washington University in St. Louis, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin has looked to the past — the university co-founder who called for the end of slavery; researchers who won Nobel Prizes; the professor who brought quality science education to neighborhood schools; the students who led the charge for greater diversity and equity on campus; and the many other students, staff and faculty who have demonstrated a commitment to academic excellence, inclusion, educational access and to the strength of the St. Louis region. 

Their accomplishments are celebrated in the new exhibit “Momentum: Bridging Past, Present, and Future,” which will be on view from Saturday, Sept.  28, until Dec. 15 and is located in John M. Olin Library, at the Kagan Grand Staircase lobby on Level 1. “Momentum” also is the theme of Martin’s inauguration, which takes place Thursday, Oct. 3. 

“We drew upon our vast collection of campus publications, photographs, books, architectural plans and artifacts to tell the story of Washington University and how we are always moving forward, building on the solid foundation that was laid early in our history,” said Sonya Rooney, university archivist. 

Highlights include: the diary of Chancellor William Greenleaf Eliot, who called for emancipation; the Nobel diploma awarded to Washington University professors Carl and Gerty Cori for their groundbreaking discovery of how the body converts glycogen to glucose; photos of the WashU Flood Response Team helping sandbag during the Great Flood of 1993; and a reproduction of the “Student Life” front page chronicling protests led by the Association of Black Collegians, which resulted in the beginning of the Black Studies Department and changes to university admissions, employment and financial aid practices. 

Rooney hopes the exhibit inspires the community to explore the University Archives′ 300 unique collections.  

“We have such a rich history, and this exhibit is just the tip of the iceberg,” Rooney said. 

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Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will share with collaborating institutions $29.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve the accuracy and diversity of the reference human genome sequence. The aim is to better reflect the spectrum of human diversity around the world and make the reference genome a more useful tool for researchers.

The new project continues the legacy of the university’s McDonnell Genome Institute, which played a major role in the original Human Genome Project, completed in 2002. The institute contributed 25% of the genetic data needed to spell out — in order — all 3.1 billion units of DNA that make up the human genome. Like the first human genome sequencing program, the new Human Pangenome Reference Sequencing Project is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the NIH.

“Having the reference human genome has really opened the door to personalized medicine,” said Ting Wang, the co-lead principal investigator of the new program and the Sanford C. and Karen P. Loewentheil Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Washington University. “But the original human genome is from a few volunteers. And for many parts of the reference genome, the sequence is from only one individual. The current reference sequence also has very limited diversity built into it.”

“The goal of this new round of sequencing for the human pangenome project is to incorporate human diversity,” said Wang, also a professor of genetics. “New technology allows us to sequence individual chromosomes from end to end, picking up portions of the sequence that were hard to capture with old methods. So, the new sequencing efforts will be more diverse and more complete as well.”

Said Ira M. Hall, co-lead principal investigator of the new program and an associate professor of medicine at Washington University: “The human reference genome is crucial for biomedical research and precision medicine, but the current version suffers from major limitations. This project is an exciting opportunity to improve the human reference by extending it to include a larger and more diverse set of individuals.”

Washington University and its collaborators will perform whole genome sequencing of 350 individuals from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and make that data available as a reference resource for the scientific community. Wang said the new reference genome will require new and innovative methods to present data, since representing the genomes of 350 people will require more than a linear string of DNA “letters.”

Washington University will lead a collaboration with the University of California at Santa Cruz and the European Bioinformatics Institute to form the WashU-UCSC-EBI Human Pangenome Reference Center. A second center focused on sequencing — the Human Pangenome Sequencing Center — will be led by the University of California at Santa Cruz and includes the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University, and the University of Washington in Seattle.

“The original reference human genome has been a vital scientific tool, but it’s incomplete,” said Lucinda Antonacci-Fulton, an instructor in genetics and director of operations at the McDonnell Genome Institute. “Rather than a single volume reference, these new sequencing efforts will create a diverse set of encyclopedias to form the human pangenome, a reference resource that will better reflect the diversity of human populations worldwide.”

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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