Abram Van Engen, associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Laura Cobb was struck by a drunken driver during her senior year at Washington University in 2008. She was seriously injured and today has aphasia, which severely limits her ability to speak. But she battled back, returned to school and graduated in May. She now works as a research technician on campus.

Stanley Arthur Sawyer, professor emeritus of mathematics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2017. He was 77.

University College is hosting a solar eclipse watch party and ice cream social next week. Gather with others in the university community starting at noon Monday, Aug. 21, on Mudd Field. Those who RSVP will receive viewing glasses.

Co-hosted by Elizabeth Haswell, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Taproot is a new podcast that takes listeners behind the the curtain to reveal what it was really like to do the work so opaquely described in journal articles.

University College, the professional and continuing education division of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is now offering a 50 percent discount to full-time employees of St. Louis, Clayton and University City and their school districts. Charter school employees also are eligible.

Letty Chen, associate professor of modern Chinese language and literature in Arts & Sciences, delivered a lecture titled “Technology of Memory: How We Remember and How We Forget” in late June at the University of Hong Kong.

William F. Tate, dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received the 2017 Inspiring Leaders in STEM Award from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine. Tate is also vice provost for graduate education and the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences. 

“Too Far North,” a poem written by Aaron Coleman, a PhD candidate in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences, was published recently in The New York Times Magazine. Coleman also recently received a Philip K. Jansen Memorial Fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association.

Sophisticated techniques for testing hypotheses about the brain by activating and silencing genes are currently available for only a handful of model organisms. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are working on a simplified toolkit that will allow scientists who study animal behavior to manipulate the genomes of many other animals with the hope of accelerating progress in our understanding of the brain.