Arts & Sciences

Washington University’s Prison Education Project has won a two-year, $980,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The award resulted from the Mellon Foundation’s “Future of Higher Learning in Prison” competition.

Sometimes overshadowed by neighboring Amazon forests, the forests of the Andes Mountains are helping to protect the planet by acting as a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide and keeping some of this climate-altering gas out of circulation, according to biologists in Arts & Sciences and their partners from a Living Earth Collaborative working group.

Macy Sprunger, a graduate student in Meredith Jackrel’s lab in the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won a three-year $136,560 National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Such fellowships support predoctoral students conducting research in scientific health-related fields.

Michael Nowak, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is co-author of a study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that shares unprecedented observations of the black hole in the galaxy M87.

John E. McCarthy, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics and chair of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, received a five-year $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop new tools to deal with complexity in the design of systems like those used in automatic pilots and self-driving cars.

Zachariah Reagh, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been named a “Rising Star” by the Association for Psychological Sciences.

As China prepares for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, thousands of theaters have been instructed to screen at least two propaganda films each week. But political jargon and ideological mandates may not sit well with 21st-century moviegoers, argues Zhao Ma, associate professor of modern Chinese history and culture in Arts & Sciences.

With a storied literary past, Washington University continues to provide time, place and space to stretch as a poet.

Two Washington University scientists are reconstructing past climate and cultural shifts in the Peruvian Andes. Today, such high-altitude parts of the tropics are warming faster than the rest of the globe. What Bronwen Konecky and Sarah Baitzel discover could help predict how this delicate ecosystem might be affected in the future.

In her course “Sick Society,” Hedwig Lee, professor of sociology, shows that lifestyle and genes aren’t the only things impacting health.