Presiding at the event was Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton with special guest Scott Rudolph, philanthropist and WUSTL parent, accompanied by his sons, Michael and Ian.

“On this important occasion, we gather to recognize Brad Jolliff as one of the world’s leading planetary scientists, and to extend our gratitude to Scott and Pyong Rudolph for supporting this endowed professorship, and for their outstanding generosity and commitment to the work being done in Earth and Planetary Sciences and throughout the university,” Wrighton said.

“Earth and Planetary Sciences’ association with the Rudolph family, begun officially with our building’s rededication as Scott Rudolph Hall last May, is now stronger with the establishment of this professorship,” said Douglas Wiens, PhD, professor and chair of the department.

“Professor Brad Jolliff is one of our most outstanding scientists and, thanks to Scott, he will now be on our faculty for many years, giving our students a chance to participate in the geological exploration of other worlds,” Wiens said.

Jolliff joined Washington University in 1988, then took a leave to serve in the Persian Gulf War. He returned in 1992 and since has made important contributions as a teacher and research scientist. 

Both undergraduate and graduate students are part of his lab team, which studies surfaces of the moon, Mars and other terrestrial planets. As such, his students become exposed not only to the science, but also to the workings of the many NASA initiatives Jolliff is involved with, among them the Mars exploration rovers, the MoonRise New Frontiers project and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.

To understand the physical properties of these surfaces, Jolliff studies the petrologic and geochemical elements in rocks and minerals, as well as their formation processes and petrogenetic history, through lunar samples, and through Martian materials and terrestrial analogs. Through remote sensing and automated in-situ determination of surface mineralogy of the moon, Mars and other bodies, he and his team are discovering how materials are distributed and how surfaces have evolved over time.

“Understanding how lunar materials got distributed the way they did is important to me, especially if we are ever to use the moon as a resource for further exploration,” Jolliff explained. “The moon is still a hard place to get to.”

“Brad is a superb educator because he teaches students to think like a scientist. This is a critical aspect of our mission at Washington University,” said Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

“In addition to the critical research Brad is involved in, he also is helping shape the quality of scientists to come,” Schaal added. “A number of outstanding graduates have worked in his lab, men and women who are now scientists in their own right and, as future leaders in their fields, will address the nation’s current and future challenges.”

The Rudolphs’ connection with WUSTL began when their oldest son, Michael, entered the university in 2009. Last fall, son Ian joined the Class of 2016, further strengthening their ties. Both Rudolph sons are studying business; Michael graduated this May.

“Since then, the Rudolphs have become a part of our family, embracing our mission for excellence and contributing their time, talent and financial support to that mission,” Wrighton said. “Their generosity seems to know no bounds.”

This professorship is part of a $10 million gift they have given as an investment in people, scholarships, programs and facilities. The couple also provided a $1 million scholarship challenge to support Opening Doors to the Future: The Scholarship Initiative for Washington University.

Rudolph’s connection to the Earth and Planetary Sciences department relates to his avocation, geology and mineral collecting, coupled with his belief that education is the key to moving forward in life.

Foreseeing the rising popularity of vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements, Rudolph established US Nutrition Inc. in 1977 while still a teenager working out of his parents’ garage in a Long Island suburb. In less than a decade, it was purchased by NBTY (formerly Nature’s Bounty), the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of nutritional supplements, with Rudolph at the helm as chief executive officer. His new venture, Piping Rock Health Products, represents the next phase of his career in the health and nutrition business.

The Rudolphs are active members of the Parents Council and are sustaining charter members of the Danforth Circle, Chancellor’s Level. Scott Rudolph co-chairs the Parents Committee and is a member of the New York City Executive Committee for Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Trustees and serves on its Global Engagement Committee; he also serves on the university’s Entrepreneurship National Council.

In 2011, the Rudolphs received Washington University’s Brookings Award, a prestigious honor awarded by the Board of Trustees to recognize outstanding dedication.

Anton DiSclafani, writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis, talks about the “thunderbolt moment”: That one line or phrase that comes to a writer out of the blue, grabs hold of precious brain matter and won’t let go.

For DiSclafani, her thunderbolt came nearly seven years ago when the writer was teaching part time in WUSTL’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences as part of her three-year fellowship program. 

Living with her husband, Mathew Smith, also a writer, in a Delmar Loop-neighborhood apartment close to the university, DiSclafani already had an idea for a novel about a young girl sent away from her family. 

She had even kicked around a setting: a camp called Yonahlossee. She got the unusual name from a camp she stayed near in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she had vacationed as a girl. But the story hadn’t really materialized. 

Jerry Naunheim Jr.

DiSclafani outside historic Ridgley Hall on the Danforth Campus of Washington University. WUSTL, she says, played an important role in her journey as a writer and teacher.

Then one night, while battling a bad cold and insomnia and sleeping in a separate room from her husband, she woke up with the opening line in her head: I was fifteen years old when my parents sent me away to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls.

After that, “I just started writing,” said the Tennessee native who grew up in northern Florida.

DiSclafani’s debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, from Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, is set for release June 4 to critical acclaim. 

The book is a result of a reported seven-figure publisher bidding war, which includes foreign rights in 12 countries, and finds itself on scores of “must-read” summer book lists, from the likes of The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly to The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly.

DiSclafani came to WUSTL’s esteemed writing program in 2004 as a master of fine arts student in creative writing and stayed after graduating in 2006, thanks to mentors such as Kathryn Davis, Hurst Writer in Residence, and Marshall Klimasewiski, senior writer in residence, both in the English department. 

She is taking success — or the hint of it, at least — in stride.

“I was just really hoping that the book would sell,” she said. “People don’t really believe me when I say that, but there are a lot of good writers whose books haven’t sold. The publishing industry is tough.”

The novel is a coming-of-age story set in 1930, just as the economics of the Great Depression are becoming a reality for every facet of society. 

The plot centers on 15-year-old Thea Atwell, an upper middle-class daughter of a small-town doctor, who gets sent away to an equestrienne boarding school for something’s she done.

“It took me about two years to write the first draft and another year to revise and find an agent,” said DiSclafani, who grew up riding horses. “I revised it some more with my agent for another two-and-a-half years, and then I sold it.”

Sounds easy, right? Hardly. The bulk of the book was written, DiSclafani says, at Panera Bread Co., a coffee shop in the Loop. At the time, she and Smith, who also earned his MFA from WUSTL, were living in an under-insulated apartment in which heating the entire unit cost more than a month’s rent.

“I’d get up, put on some clothes, grab my laptop and head to Panera for two or three hours to write before moving on with my day,” she says, a day that could have included, at given times, one of four jobs: teaching, seasonal work at Williams-Sonoma, babysitting and transcription work.

“All part time,” she says. “All the things that writers — or anybody who doesn’t have a full-time job — do to make ends meet. I would get up four hours earlier than wherever I needed to be, and just write.”

DiSclafani is happy to add that she and her husband live in a fully insulated apartment in St. Louis now, but she still keeps that work ethic. It served her well when it came time for the revision process.

“This book is pretty heavily revised,” she said. “At some point, I want to show my students the original manuscript and the final product because they’ll be vastly different. Students hate revising — which I did too as an undergrad — but it’s such an important part of the process.”

An example, she says, is how much of the novel’s setting — the Depression of 1930-31 — plays a role in the novel’s plot.

“When I was in the middle of revising, the big economic collapse of 2008 happened and a lot more of the Depression went into the revision,” she said. “There were all these changes happening. People were being forced into making choices that were different than what they might have expected, and that’s what I was interested in with the girls at the camp — the sense that the future is not just open for the taking.”

DiSclafani’s immediate future however, is a blank slate but, if readers catch on, considerably bright. She begins a national book tour in St. Louis at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 5, hosted by Subterranean Books at the Schlafly Branch of the St. Louis Public Library, 225 N. Euclid.

From there she heads to North Carolina and other points south before hitting Texas, California, Chicago and beyond. She’ll return to WUSTL in August — teaching a course in historical fiction and one in nonfiction – and of course, writing and waiting for the next thunderbolt moment.

To learn more about DiSclafani and the Yonahlossee Riding Camp, visit http://antondisclafani.com/.

To hear an audio clip of DiSclafani, visit https://thought.artsci.wustl.edu/podcasts-retellings/preview.

To learn more about the Department of English in Arts & Sciences and the programs available in writing at WUSTL, visit http://english.artsci.wustl.edu/writing.

For many older adults, the aging process seems to go hand-in-hand with an annoying increase in clumsiness — difficulties dialing a phone, fumbling with keys in a lock or knocking over the occasional wine glass while reaching for a salt shaker.

While it’s easy to see these failings as a normal consequence of age-related breakdowns in agility, vision and other physical abilities, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that some of these day-to-day reaching-and-grasping difficulties may be be caused by changes in the mental frame of reference that older adults use to visualize nearby objects.

“Reference frames help determine what in our environment we will pay attention to and they can affect how we interact with objects, such as controls for a car or dishes on a table,” said study co-author Richard Abrams, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. 

Abrams

Bloesch

Young adults, the researchers explain, have been shown to use an “action-centered” reference frame that is sensitive to the movements they are making. So, when young people move their hands to pick up an object, they remain aware of and sensitive to potential obstacles along the movement path. Older adults, on the other hand, tend to devote more attention to objects that are closer to their bodies — whether they are on the action path or not.

“We showed in our paper that older adults do not use an “action centered” reference frame. Instead they use a “body centered” one,” Bloesch said. “As a result, they might be less able to effectively adjust their reaching movements to avoid obstacles — and that’s why they might knock over the wine glass after reaching for the salt shaker.”

Davoli

These findings mesh well with other research that has documented age-related physical declines in several areas of the brain that are responsible for hand-eye coordination. Older adults exhibit volumetric declines in the parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, as well as white-matter loss in the parietal lobe and precuneus. These declines may make the use of an action-centered reference frame difficult or impossible.

“These three areas are highly involved in visually guided hand actions like reaching and grasping and in creating attentional reference frames that are used to guide such actions. These neurological changes in older adults suggest that their representations of the space around them may be compromised relative to those of young adults and that, consequently, young and older adults might encode and attend to near-body space in fundamentally different ways,” the study finds.

As the U.S. population ages, research on these issues is becoming increasingly important. An estimated 60-to-70 percent of the elderly population reports difficulty with activities of daily living, such as eating and bathing and many show deficiencies in performing goal-directed hand movements. Knowing more about these aging-related changes in spatial representation, the researchers suggest, may eventually inspire options for skills training and other therapies to help seniors compensate for the cognitive declines that influence hand-eye coordination

This research, supported by Grant AG0030 from the National Institute on Aging.

The findings of William Tate, PhD, chair of the Department of Education and the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, and Mark Hogrebe, PhD, an institutional researcher in the department, were published in the Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College (Columbia University).

Hogrebe and Tate said some of their research would not have been possible even 10 or 12 years ago, but thanks to advances in technology, they were able to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data and computer models to analyze relationships between various educational factors on a regional basis. 

Their analysis is an example of the kind of research with which the university's GIS office can help faculty, students and administrators, though the office wasn't involved in this paper. (See previous Record story).

Image courtesy of Mark Hogrebe

The map shows the relationship between the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches and Algebra I scores in Missouri school districts. The dark-shaded areas are those in which a higher percentage of students receiving such lunches is associated with lower end-of-course algebra scores. This statistically significant relationship is not found in lighter-shaded areas. Districts in white generally are elementary-only and have no Algebra I data.

A more logical approach is to see how locations across the state vary in educational contexts and to study how different ecologies affect academic outcomes, they said.

The article’s big takeaway was that place matters in analyzing relationships between algebra performance and other educational variables.

For example, the researchers studied whether a higher percentage of children in poverty was related to lower algebra scores, and whether higher teacher salaries meant higher algebra scores. They found those relationships held true in some districts but not across the board.

Their article used an example that aptly explains the issue: You wouldn’t consider one statewide weather forecast effective or reliable, so why is it acceptable that state education policies are one-size-fits-all?

Tate

Hogrebe and Tate found that a single, global measurement based on aggregated data doesn’t properly account for important local variations.

“There need to be location-specific solutions,” Tate said.

Policies are unlikely to help students or be cost-effective if they apply the same response statewide, the researchers found.

“The evidence suggests that’s not a good way of doing education policy-making,” Tate said.

The researchers hope their work helps inform education policy and guide lawmakers and others as they determine the best use of scarce resources.

To review the article, visit here.

This famous still of Harold Lloyd in the 1923 film Safety Last epitomizes the plight of modern human beings, equipped with biological clocks designed to adjust to gentle seasonal changes in daylight, but unable to make the brusque changes militated by mechanical clocks, shift work, travel across time zones and artificial lights.

Synchronizing the cellular clocks
The “clock” inside each SCN neuron depends on the cyclic expression of a family of genes such as the Period (PER) genes. The expression of these genes and the neuron’s firing rate typically peak at mid-day and fall at night. The gene activity is like the cogs in a clock, and the electrical activity like the hands on the clock.

Each neuron in the SCN keeps time, but because they’re different cells, they have slightly different rhythms. Some run a little bit fast and others a bit slow. If the SCN as a whole is to function as a clock, its neurons need to synchronize with one another.

NIH

A wrench for the Brain Activity Map toolkit?

Ever since President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to map all the functional connections in the human brain, scientists have been worrying out loud that we may not yet have tools up to the task. After all, the brain has more than a billion neurons that make more than a trillion connections.

Herzog says the technique used in his lab to study the biological clock might be useful for the Brain Activity Map as well. By recording neuronal activity, researchers can look for correlated changes between cells. When neuron 1 increases its firing, neuron 2 might be excited and increase its firing.

The problem is knowing if that increase was a coincidence or a consequence. The technique, called BSAC (Between Sample Analysis of Connectivity) reliably reveals functional connections by first describing the statistics of impossible connections. If the two neurons are in different dishes, they cannot communicate so the increased firing of neuron 2 must have been a coincidence.

By recording from lots of neurons in independent networks, BSAC defines the weakest possible connections that can be detected within a neural network. This could be useful in mapping connections between pairs of neurons or between brain regions.

The goal of the recent work in the Herzog lab has been to figure out how the clock cells are connected to each other. “It wasn’t clear, for example, if each neuron communicated with just a few of its neighbors or with all of them,” Herzog says.

Mark Freeman, a graduate student in the lab, developed a method for recording the firing rate of about 100 neurons simultanously on a multi-electrode array. “You float the SCN neurons down gently,” Herzog says, “and the neurons will attach to the electrodes, creating a clock in a dish that will tick away for weeks or months.”

Using these electrode arrays, his lab demonstrated that the neurons in the SCN are synchronized by the exchange of the neuropeptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide), which alters the expression of PER to speed up or slow down neurons until they are all in synch.

These synchronized networks are very precise, says Herzog. If you let them free-run in constant darkness they will lose or gain only a few minutes out of the 1,440 minutes in a day. So they’re accurate to within 1 or 2 percent.

But they’re ever so slightly off the 24-hour cycle tied to one turn of the planet on its axis. Over time they would drift far enough off that cycle to be of little use to us, unless they also had some means of synchronizing to local time.

Resetting the cellular clocks
In the article published in Neuron, Herzog and his colleagues report on a second network in the biological clock.

In this network the connections are made by the neurotransmitter GABA (γ-amino-butyric acid). “We proved we had found a GABAergic network by applying drugs that block GABA receptors on the cells,” Herzog says. “All of the connections we had mapped between neurons dropped out.”

Remarkably, when the network drops out, the clock becomes more precise. So the GABAergic network destabilizes the clock; it jiggles it a little.

Herzog points out that the GABAergic network, is sparse, weak and fast (much faster than the VIP network, which relies on the slower action of a neuropeptide), as you might expect a jitter-generator to be.

“We think the GABAergic network is there to let our clocks adjust to environmental cues, such as gradual, seasonal changes in sunrise and sunset,” says Herzog. 

It’s a bit like whacking an old television set that has lost vertical synch to get it to resynch with the broadcast signal.

But there isn’t enough jitter in the clock to allow it to make abrupt adjustments, such as the one-hour forward jump when Daylight Savings Time starts. That “spring forward” has been statistically shown to increase the likelihood of heart attacks and car accidents, Herzog says.

Some sleep aids, such as benzodiazepines, that activate the GABA receptors may make the circadian clock a little more jittery, helping people adjust to big time jumps, such as flying across time zones. “But we don’t yet know whether they can improve jetlag; if they do, we want to know if it is because they help you sleep on the long flight or because they help the biological clock adjust to the new time zone,” Herzog cautions.

In any case, it is clear that if people repeatedly force the clock to reset, they throw off more than sleep. The biological clock regulates metabolism and cell division as well as sleep/wake cycles. So shift work, for example, is associated both with metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, and with the unregulated cell division that characterizes cancer.

Fighting our biological clocks does a lot more than make us crabby coffee drinkers. 

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has appointed Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, as chair of an advisory group that will lead NAS’ new Gulf of Mexico program.

Schaal

The $500 million, 30-year Gulf of Mexico program was established as part of the settlements of federal criminal complaints against British Petroleum and Transocean Ltd. following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which resulted in 11 deaths, 17 injuries and the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

The program will focus on human health, environmental protection and oil system safety in the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S.’s Outer Continental Shelf, and will fund and carry out studies, projects and activities in research and development, education and training, and environmental monitoring.

The advisory group, which will serve for one year, will help create a strategic vision and guide the program’s development and implementation.

The 24-member group draws on the science, engineering and health expertise of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Institute of Medicine and National Research Council.

The group includes people with experience in academia and industry, as well as people with deep connections to the Gulf region.

“The advisory group brings distinction, expertise from diverse disciplines, and a wide range of experience to the task of defining the program,” said NAS President Ralph J. Cicerone. “With Dr. Schaal’s leadership and her familiarity with the National Academy of Sciences and its values, we’re confident that the program’s design will be based on scientific merit and integrity.”

The advisory group will articulate the program’s mission, goals and objectives — including preliminary thinking about metrics to measure its impacts — and outline how the program will operate in the first three to five years.

The program will be run under the auspices of the National Research Council, the principal operating arm of the NAS and NAE.

Schaal is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and is one of three science envoys for 2012-13 appointed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Sorokina

“It’s always been a part of my life. I’ve always wanted to go back,” she said.

Sorokina just completed her sophomore year at Washington University in St. Louis. She is double-majoring in comparative arts and international and area studies, both in Arts & Sciences.

Sorokina was awarded a David L. Boren scholarship, which provides funding for U.S. undergraduate students to study abroad in parts of the world critical to U.S. interests and underrepresented in study-abroad programs.

The National Security Education Program funds Boren Scholarships. The program focuses on areas, languages and fields of study important to national security, broadly defined to range from promotion of America’s well-being to environmental protection to disease prevention.

While born in Russia, Sorokina and her family moved to Japan when she was young because her father, an engineer, received a fellowship at the University of Tsukuba, she recalled. She lived there for four years, until she was 6 years old.

After moving to the United States, her parents found a Japanese program in their Maryland community, so she continued studying the language, history and other aspects of Japanese culture on Saturdays throughout her childhood.

“I missed out on a lot of sleepovers when I was younger,” she joked.

Sorokina plans to head to Japan in January and stay there until August 2014, taking courses and experiencing the culture in Kyoto and, during the summer, in Tokyo. Her coursework will count toward her degree requirements at WUSTL.

And while it won’t be totally new and she has a basic grasp of the language, Sorokina said she has much still to learn.

As a condition of receiving a Boren scholarship, students agree to a year of work for the federal government in a national security-related job. Sorokina said she envisions working for the State Department for a year after graduation if a position is available. She said she also could serve in the Peace Corps to fulfill her obligation.

Sorokina said she’d love to land a job focused on the cultural, rather than the political, side of foreign policy, and that her Boren obligation could help her learn what such work is like and what she wants to do long-term.

The three researchers were recognized for “revolutionary biotechnology discoveries that unlocked the key to plant cell transformation.”

Mary-Dell Chilton, PhD (left), celebrates with Barbara Schaal, PhD, at the 2009 installation ceremony naming Schaal the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

While on Washington University’s faculty, Chilton led a collaborative research study that produced the first transgenic plants. This pioneering work led directly to the field of genetic engineering of foods and plants.

Chilton’s groundbreaking molecular research showed how a plant bacterium could be adapted as a tool to insert genes from another organism into plant cells, which could produce crop varieties with new innovative traits.

In 1996, as a direct consequence of her research, Ciba-Geigy — now Syngenta—  became the first company to commercialize a GM trait in corn. By 2012, transgenic crops were being grown on more than 170 million hectares by more than 17 million farmers.

Chilton has served in a number of key roles at Syngenta since leaving WUSTL in 1983 as associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.

Before joining the WUSTL faculty in 1979, Chilton worked as a postdoctoral researcher and research faculty member at the University of Washington. She earned undergraduate (with highest distinction) and graduate degrees in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

While at the University of Washington, Chilton led a team from three departments in a study of how a bacterium can cause tumors (gall) to grow on plants. They found that the bacterium carried tumor-inducing genes that it specifically transferred into the plant cell, making them grow rapidly. Chilton recalls the irony of giving cancer to tobacco plants, which were the white rats of the plant kingdom.

At Washington University, her group studied how this worked and found a way to “disarm” the tumor-inducing genes and get the bacteria to insert genes for crop improvement. In a collaboration with Andrew Binns, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Chilton’s team produced the first transgenic plant and showed that it passed the new trait to its progeny.

In 2002, Chilton joined the list of such scientific luminaries as Thomas Edison and Marie Curie as the recipient of The Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences. Other major honors include being inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

In 2009, Washington University named biology Professor Barbara A. Schaal as the inaugural recipient of an endowed faculty professorship, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in biology in Arts & Sciences. Today, Schaal is also dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences.

Speaking at the March 9, 2009, installation ceremony, Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton noted that the professorship honors two of Washington University’s pioneering women biologists.

“This is a proud moment in Washington University’s history,” Wrighton said. “While conducting research in the biology department in the late 1970s, Mary-Dell Chilton, PhD, made an astonishing discovery that led to the emergence of the new scientific field of plant genetic engineering. This discovery revolutionized plant science and gave plant geneticists who followed, such as Barbara Schaal, the ability to translate that knowledge into improving the world’s food crops.”

Schaal’s research, which has been published in more than 150 scholarly journals, involves studying the evolutionary genetics of plants, with the goal of applying that research to enrich plants such as the cassava, which serves as a major food source for sub-Saharan African populations. 

Schaal’s team studies the use of DNA sequences to understand evolutionary processes such as gene flow, geographical differentiation and the domestication of crop species.

Marilee Fisher has made the initital list of contenders for the 2013 NCAA Woman of the Year Award, the NCAA recently announced. Fisher, of Mountain View, Calif., graduated this year from Washington University in St. Louis. She is one of 455 student-athletes across all NCAA divisions and sports vying for the award.

Fisher, a four-time All-American at WUSTL, was a starter on the 2009 NCAA Division III National Championship volleyball squad and led her teams to a combined 134-14 career record. She earned 2012 Capital One Second-Team Academic All-America honors as a senior after picking up third-team accolades in 2011.

Greg hargrave

WUSTL volleyball player Marilee Fisher, who graduated this year, is a contender for the 2013 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

Wikimedia

Somewhere on Mars, the Red Planet? No, it’s somewhere in the Atacama Desert, the closest approximation on our planet to a Martian landscape.

A film director looking for a location where a movie about Mars could be shot might consider the Atacama Desert, a strip of land on the coast of South America west of the Andes that is one of the harshest landscapes on the planet. Due to the accidents of its geography, Atacama is the driest place on Earth. Some scientists believe there was no rain to speak of in part of the Atacama between 1570 and 1971. With little moisture in the air its salt lakes, sand dunes and lava flows broil or freeze and are blasted by ultraviolet radiation.

The conditions make the Atacama a splendid place to test instruments for future Mars missions.

“If you’re practicing to find life on Mars, you don’t want to go to a lush environment," says Alian Wang, PhD, research professor in the earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a participant in NASA’s ASTEP program to advance the technology and techniques used in planetary exploration.

A. Wang

Zoe sets out bravely in the Atacama. Like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004 Zoe is powered by solar panels. Because dust on the panels sometimes shuts down the rovers, the Curiosity rover, which reached Mars in 2012, is nuclear powered. In the Atacama, however, Zoe’s panels can be cleaned if they should become dusty

Subsurface samples pulled up by a meter-long drill and dumped into sample cups carried by a carousel are to be examined by a laser Raman spectrometer called the Mars Microbeam Raman Spectrometer, or MMRS.

Wang, the principle investigator for the spectrometer, also remotely operates it from her office in St. Louis. Her colleague Jie Wei, PhD, a research scientist in earth and planetary sciences, is traveling with the rover in the Atacama.

Google Earth

Zoe's planned path through the Atacama includes visits to salt flats, volcanic slopes and alluvial fans of material eroded off of mountains.

Wang says they are hoping Zoe will drive 40 to 50 kilometers and drill 10 to 15 boreholes.

Ready for prime time
The MMRS in its current compact, robust configuration is the culmination of 18 years of work at WUSTL and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), led first by former WUSTL professor Larry Haskin, and now by Wang.

The MMRS was originally scheduled to ride on the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity but after NASA lost two missions on approach to Mars — the Polar Lander and the Climate Orbiter — the MER rovers were downsized and offloaded. The Raman spectrometer, because it was the newest analytical instruments on the rovers, was a casualty of this process.

However, it is now the top candidate among instruments being considered for a 2020 mission to Mars and Wang has just received $3 million from NASA to make sure that it will be mission ready.

What’s special about Raman? The spectrometer shines a laser on the sample and measures the energy of the photons the sample scatters back. “Compared to other spectroscopies," Wang says, “Raman spectroscopy returns a very clear spectrum. So if you analyze a mixture (rock or soil) you see peaks for each mineral phase and organic molecule. You don’t have to do complicated spectral processing to identify what's in the sample. So compared to other spectroscopies,” Wang says, “ its very diagnostic. “

Don’t fail me now
The journeys in the Atacama are intended is to test the MMRS (and other instruments) until they fail. If a power system is going to fail on Mars, it will probably fail as well in the Atacama. And far better it should fail while still Earth-bound, than when it is 34 million miles away on the Martian surface.

Last year Wang was part of a team that tested instruments in the desert, without the rover, boring holes with hand-held equipment and operating the instruments manually. 

A. Wang

The laser Raman spectrometer (silver box) aboard Zoe. The peaks in a Raman spectra immediately identify the chemical compounds in the sample, without further processing. None of the instruments aboard the rovers currently on Mars can match its diagnostic ability.

Wang was the PI for three of the instruments. “We found some problems we never expected,” she says.

“The heat generated by cooling the Raman spectrometer's detector  is dissipated by a cooling fan. When we came to the Atacama we were sometimes as high as 4,500 meters (14,800 feet) above sea level. The air is so thin at that altitude, the fan labored to get rid of the heat. That’s one lesson we learned.”

“Of course it will be different on Mars, “she says, “ where the atmosphere is much thinner, but we learned where the instrument is vulnerable. “

On the other hand the laser in the Raman probe has to stay within a certain temperature range to operate properly. “But when we came to Laguna Lejia suddenly we weren’t getting a strong enough signal,” Wang says. “We started checking and discovered the laser power was only a fifteenth of its normal value. It was so windy and cold the laser couldn’t warm up. We had to run it longer before taking measurements to get a good signal. So we learned we had to work out a better temperature control for this laser.”

A. Wang

Wang and Pablo Sobron, PhD, then a postdoctoral research associate, testing a WIR, an infrared spectrometer sensitive to water,  in the Atacama last year. Wang’s team has field tested instruments in some of the most exotic locales on Earth, including not just the Atacama, but also the Tibetan Plateau and Svalbard, a remote Norwegian island.

Both discoveries were invaluable since they will allow the team to safeguard against these problems so that they don't occur on Mars.

It’s alive!
After the Viking landers failed to find evidence of life on Mars in the late 1970s, a group of scientists took duplicate instruments into the Atacama, where they, too, failed to find evidence of life. They did, however, encounter oxidizing soil conditions in the Atacama that destroyed organic molecules, a leading hypothesis for the apparent sterility of the Martian soils.

The Atacama soil tests done last year confirmed the presence of microorganisms in the desert soils. The presence of life in the Atacama does not of course guarantee its presence on Mars. But it does show that if there is subsurface life, the instruments will be able to detect it.

The initiative, which was announced in 2011, is designed to encourage departments in these disciplines at AAU universities to adopt proven, evidence-based teaching practices and to provide faculty with the encouragement, training and support to do so.

“This proposal allows for the collaborative development of teaching strategies in our STEM curriculum that will bring benefit to all universities that prepare future leaders in STEM fields,” said Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.

Wrighton

Washington University has been involved in and has supported STEM-education reform since the early 1990s when it used a series of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) undergraduate education grants to implement critical changes in course work and teaching methods designed to get students more engaged in their own learning process in areas such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and engineering.

Over the last decade, the university has developed several programs aimed at moving teaching from a solitary endeavor to a more collaborative, interdisciplinary community effort where best practices are freely shared, fine-tuned and continually improved.

In 2008, a group of 20-30 university faculty and staff with an interest in STEM education established an informal, interdisciplinary STEM-focused teaching community that meets weekly to discuss theireducational research projects.

“Evaluation of our education innovations through collaboration between CIRCLE and faculty across the university ensures that innovations improve student learning and retention in STEM majors,” Wrighton said. “These evaluation studies will help identify key features important for the widespread and effective implementation of empirically validated teaching practices in STEM classrooms and effective mechanisms of support for institutional change.”

Over the next three years, each of the eight campus sites selected by AAU will implement a major undergraduate STEM education project that incorporates key elements of the AAU STEM framework, which is based on these more effective teaching practices.

The eight sites were chosen from among 31 AAU universities that submitted concept papers, based on a number of criteria, such as the degree of department and faculty engagement, institutional commitment, likelihood of sustained organizational change, and commitment to evaluation and assessment.

In addition, the process was designed to ensure that projects would address a wide range of the elements outlined in the AAU STEM Framework. The elements focus on various challenges departments face in changing teaching methods, ranging from assessing and rewarding teaching excellence to faculty professional development and assessing student learning.

Frey

Frey, an associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, is executive director of The Teaching Center and co-director with McDaniel of CIRCLE. 

McDaniel

Thoroughman also serves as director of undergraduate studies for the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

As lead investigator of an HHMI grant that supports curricular development, K-12 outreach and undergraduate research, Miller is very involved in a number of initiatives on topics related to the AAU STEM education project. She’s also heavily involved in higher-education curricular reform on a national level.

Miller

Thoroughman

Ultimately, the initiative aims to bring about a culture change in the Washington University learning community, one that integrates the educational research and teaching communities and spurs more and more faculty to incorporate proven and effective active-learning techniques in their classrooms.

Washington University’s proposal encompasses the schools of Art & Sciences and of Engineering and Applied Science and initially five departments (biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, chemical engineering and biomedical engineering) and four university-wide centers (The Teaching Center, CIRCLE, Cornerstone and Washington University libraries). 

One key component of the proposal to increase the number of faculty focusing on implementing and evaluating evidence-based STEM methodologies is the CIRCLE Fellows Program, which calls for the annual selection of two to three core faculty from various STEM disciplines to serve as CIRCLE fellows for two years. Faculty participating in the program will receive intensive support from The Teaching Center and CIRCLE for the implementation and evaluation of new STEM teaching techniques in their undergraduate courses.

The AAU initiative received a three-year, $4.7 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust last October that has enabled the association to develop the initiative framework and will provide a total of $500,000 seed money to each project site over the next three years for implementing change.

AAU also will create an AAU STEM network in which it expects most or all of its universities to participate. The network will enable faculty and administrators at AAU institutions to share best practices and promote sustainable change in undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.

Last month, AAU announced that it had received a two-year, $294,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a set of metrics for the initiative that will allow individual institutions to evaluate their use of evidence-based teaching practices.

“We have reached an exciting milestone in our initiative,” said AAU President Hunter Rawlings. “With the strong support provided by the Helmsley Trust, these eight project sites will each begin — or in some cases continue — to institutionalize evidence-based teaching in STEM fields. These changes will make teaching and learning far more interactive and participatory, and we hope will enhance overall student learning in STEM fields and reduce the number of students who choose to drop out of these majors.”

He added, “The selection committee faced a very difficult task, as many universities submitted concept papers of very high quality. Eventually, it is our hope that all of our institutions will participate in and benefit from this initiative, because the truth is they are all working hard to improve undergraduate STEM teaching and learning.”

# # # # #

The Association of American Universities is an association of 60 U.S. and two Canadian research universities organized to develop and implement effective national and institutional policies supporting research and scholarship, graduate and professional education, undergraduate education, and public service in research universities. For more information on the AAU initiative, contact Ann Speicher: 202-898-7857; ann.speicher@aau.edu.

The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust aspires to improve lives by supporting effective nonprofits in a variety of selected areas. Since 2008, when the Trust began its active grant making, it has committed more than $900 million to a wide range of charitable organizations. Through its National Education Program, the Trust views education as a lever to advance both American economic competitiveness and individual social mobility. In K-12, the Trust focuses on ensuring all students graduate high school prepared for college or careers by supporting teacher effectiveness and the implementation of high academic standards. In postsecondary education, the Trust is primarily interested in increasing the number of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates who can participate in high growth sectors of the economy. The Trust also focuses on policy levers that improve postsecondary completion, particularly for underrepresented populations. For more information, visit www.helmsleytrust.org.

Alan Templeton

Inside a cistern in Northern Israel, a hyloid frog (bottom left) shelters together with a splendid pair of fire salamanders (Salamandra infraimmaculata).

Every once in a while, a scientist comes upon a perfect setup for great science, one where nature poses a intriguing and important question that the scientist sees can be answered with the tools at hand. For biologist Alan Templeton, PhD, the setup was a fire salamander genus that can do “all sorts of crazy things” to adapt to changes in its environment.

One species of the fire salamander, Salamandra infraimmaculata, is found in the Middle East, where it sometimes lives in rock pools small enough to dry out after the rainy season ends. As true amphibians, the salamanders have an aquatic phase with gills and tiny legs and a terrestrial phase with lungs and stout legs.

The larval salamanders are able to sense when the water volume in their pond is dropping. Once the water drops, the clock is ticking. If the salamanders are to survive, they must morph to the terrestrial phase before the water disappears.

Here’s the crazy part. “What they’ll do when they sense the water volume dropping is start developing bigger heads,” Templeton said. “The largest larvae gets the biggest head so he can eat up all the smaller larvae to fuel his own metamorphosis. It’s called a cannibal morph.”

That’s just one of the many tricks the larval salamanders can pull to adjust their life histories to their circumstances. “Their developmental profile is very flexible,” Templeton said.

“One way to get a flexible developmental profile with the same set of genes is to turn genes on or off in a coordinated fashion in response to environmental cues,” he said.

Templeton and his colleagues recently received more than $2 million to look more closely at these shifting patterns of gene expression, called the salamanders’ transcriptomes.

An Israel-German-American collaboration

Templeton became involved in the conservation of two Israeli species, the fire salamander and the wild ass, through visiting professorships. He is currently a senior research associate and part-time professor of biology at the University of Haifa in Israel, as well as the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis (soon-to-be professor emeritus).

“My Israeli colleagues and I started to study Salamandra infraimmaculata several years ago because this salamander is on the endangered species list there. We knew almost nothing about them,” he said. 

“We actually found they are much more common than most people think, so they’re not endangered, but very little was known about their ecology and behavior.” 

Leon Blaustein, PhD, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Haifa, began to study the salamanders’ ecology. (He did the experiment that showed larva can sense the water level in pools.) When Shirli Bar-David became a postdoctoral researcher in Blaustein’s lab, the group started to look at the salamanders’ genetics as well.

Alan Templeton

Alan Templeton, his wife, Bonnie, and Moshe Enbar, chair of the Department of Evolution and Ecology at the University of Haifa in Israel, attempt to catch salamanders. “We were collecting salamanders at night in the rain on the mountaintops because that’s the only way you can catch the adults,” Templeton said. “To tell the truth, it was miserable. Moshe, who knows the area really well, told us he knew where we could catch adults in the daytime, and took us down an old cistern at an archeaological site.

People studying salamanders tend to notice other people studying salamanders and soon Templeton and Blaustein were in contact with Sebastian Steinfartz of Bielefeld University in Germany who was studying Salamandra salamandra in the Kottenforst Nature Reserve near Bonn, Germany.

In 2013, Templeton, Blaustein, Steinfartz and Arne Nolte of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, won a prestigious Deutsch-Israel Project grant of 1.6 million Euros (more than $2 million) to study how both species of salamander shift their gene expression patterns to meet environmental challenges.

Shape-shifting salamanders
The two species of salamanders look very similar, Templeton said, but genetically they’re quite distinct. Moreover, they live at the extremes of the fire salamander’s range.

Larvae of the German species can be found in streams in snow-covered forests where the water is barely above freezing, and larvae of the Israeli species can live in temporary pools in arid regions that dry up once the rainy season is over. 

Alan Templeton

Here, the scientists search for the larvae of Salamandra salamandra, a species in the same genus as Salamandra infraimmaculata, in the achingly cold water of a stream near Bielefeld in Germany.

Each species has many different larval habitats in its own country as well. “Salamandra infraimmaculata are found  in streams, ponds, springs cisterns and rock pools. Their flexibility is amazing,” Templeton said.

“Those habitats are very different, so much so that most salamander species only live in one. Except in this genus, you almost never find salamanders in more than one habitat.

“But these species haven’t been looked at very much at the DNA level because their genome is much bigger than the human genome,” Templeton said. 

The coding region, the part of the genome that is expressed, or transcribed, is about the same size as a human’s. But because salamanders have much more noncoding DNA,  studying their genomics is difficult. 

But studying salamander transcriptomes is as easy as studying human transcriptomes.

Nolte specializes in transcriptomics and Templeton also has enlisted the help of Sharlee Climer, PhD, a research assistant professor in computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, who has developed a computer program for looking at coordinated patterns of gene expression. 

Alan Templeton

The larva of the German species of fire salamander fetched out from beneath the leaf litter in a stream.

“Everything fell together perfectly,” Templeton said. “We had the people who could do ecological studies, field experiments, lab experiments and transcriptomics.” In fact, he said, the field season for salamanders (the rainy season) is mostly January and February in Israel, and the field season in German starts at the end of February. “So we can even have the same people involved in field studies in both countries.”

With luck, the team will reach a new understanding of the way interactions of the environment and genes rule the salamanders’ lives. The new dogma of modern biology? It’s not just about genes anymore.

Leslie Heusted in Danforth University Center. Photo by James Byard/WUSTL Photo Services.

Since arriving in 2008, Leslie Heusted has helped establish Danforth University Center as an integral part of campus life. As director of the Danforth University Center & Event Management Office, she leads a staff of nine in booking approximately 15,000 events, meetings, activities and classrooms each year in the DUC as well as in Graham Chapel, Ridgley Hall’s Holmes Lounge and other spaces around campus.

We sat down to discuss students, nerf guns and the structured aimlessness of afternoon tea.

This fall marks the DUC’s fifth anniversary. Talk about the rhythms of the building. What’s your favorite time of day?

Well, there’s definitely an ebb and flow. The DUC has different personalities at different times of day. In the morning, when I arrive, the sun is streaming through the windows and it’s just breathtaking. There’s a quiet, serene beauty.

How long does that last?

Not long! [Laughs.] “Lunch” basically stretches from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and we’re in a constant, low roar of activity. In the late afternoon, there’s a bit of a lull, but then the evening has a completely different speed — a hum — as the building fills up with student organizations and events.

So those are the three sides of the DUC — the quiet, the roar and the hum.

You’re from Blue Springs, Mo., and did your undergraduate work at Truman State. What did you study?

Well, I majored in sociology, but I also “majored” in out-of-the-classroom activities — I was an RA (resident adviser) as well as a member of the activities board and co-director of the women’s center. In all those settings, I learned a lot about the ways people interact, which turned out to be perfect background for what I do now.

Heusted and senior Kate Doyle at work in the DUC. Photo by James Byard/WUSTL Photo Services.

I just realized that higher education is where I need to be. My background is student activities and leadership development, and I think of myself primarily as an educator. I work with students to plan events, but I also teach them to think on their feet, to navigate situations and make things happen.

Problem solving, conflict resolution, crisis management … these are lifelong skills.

So what constitutes a crisis?

That depends on how you define the word. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, however much you map it out, but changes don’t have to be catastrophic. The trick is to acknowledge a situation and find a way to work through it — and to do that pretty much on the fly. It’s a skill you only learn through experience.

You came to WUSTL less then a month after the DUC opened. What was your initial charge?

Well, the DUC is literally the crossroads of campus, the center point between the South 40 and The Village [WUSTL’s two major student living environments]. My charge was to build programs and activities that showcase the building as a university-wide center. This is a place for everybody.

So, how did you do that? Give us some examples.

Students watch the 2009 Presidential Inauguration in Danforth University Center’s Tisch Commons. Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr./WUSTL Photo Services.

On a smaller scale, we started Tuesday Tea @ 3, which we’re still doing today with a co-sponsorship with Dining Services. Basically, we just put tea and some sweets out on a table and invite people over. It’s pretty unstructured, but the idea is to encourage informal conversation. People can use the time and space however they like.

Our Chamber Music Concert Series is a wonderful collaboration with the Department of Music, and brings in a lot of people from off-campus. We have regulars who arrive early and have dinner at Ibby’s, or stay afterward for a glass of wine.

Tell us about the Guinness book.

In 2010, the Junior Class Councils approached us about breaking the record for the world’s largest Nerf gun fight. We worked with them to develop a plan, gathered a critical mass of people and arranged for Guinness officials to observe. Then we just opened the doors.

That was a fun night. It was mayhem.

You’ve helped spearhead some recent renovations. Describe the work.

One of the great things about the DUC is how it was designed to grow and change with the needs of students. So we’ve added quite a bit of seating because we’re bursting at the seams over lunch, but we’ve also created a variety of nooks and crannies where people can have a little more privacy. The northeast corner used to be a series of doorways and hallways leading to the garage elevators, but we’ve opened that up to make it more welcoming.

On the third floor, we’ve done some work to the student media area. We have offices for Student Life, WUTV and Print Media — KWUR, the campus radio station, is moving in this summer — as well as some shared common spaces. The idea is to create opportunities for collaboration that didn’t exist before.

For those unaccustomed to staging events, what’s the big mistake we make? What should we be thinking about, but aren’t?

You have to begin with the ending in mind. What is the experience you want people to have? What’s the takeaway you want them to remember? Our job is to ask those questions and challenge people to articulate their vision. Once you know what you want to create, you can figure out the steps you need to get there.

Speaking of steps, you’re a pretty serious amateur runner. Any races coming up?

Yeah, I have a race later this summer. The goal is to run a half-marathon in every state. So far I’ve run nine, and one full marathon.

Your job is all about dealing with people. Are you a social runner?

No, I like to run alone. I think everyone needs to take some time and do things for themselves.

Some people have their best thoughts in the shower. I have my best thoughts when I’m running.

On the album You’re Everything, vocalist Feyza Eren and drummer Steve Davis swing through jazz and pop standards from Van Morrison’s Moon Dance and Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love to Alec Wilder’s Moon and Sand and Dizzy Gillespie’s Con Alma.

Feyza Eren

Eren, a St. Louis native and WUSTL alumnus, spent 16 years living and singing in Istanbul, Turkey, before returning home in 2011. 

Her recordings, in addition to You’re Everything, include the solo effort I’m New and Colored Sky, an album of original songs by Scott Sheperd.

Davis, a lecturer in the WUSTL’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, has more than 135 recordings to his credit. He has toured throughout Europe and North America and currently divides his time between St. Louis and New York.

Jazz in July will continue July 18 with San Francisco trumpeter Erik Jekabson, who will present an evening of modern jazz with a group of St. Louis performers.

The series will conclude July 25 with St. Louis drummer Maurice Carnes and his group performing a concert of original works.

All performances take place in Holmes Lounge and are free and open to the public. For more information, call (314) 862-0874; email staylor@wustl.edu; or visit Jazz at Holmes on Facebook.

Sponsors

College of Arts and Sciences, Student Union, Congress of the South 40, Department of Music in Arts and Sciences, University College and Summer School, Campus Life, Danforth University Center and Event Management, Community Service Office, Office of Student Involvement and Leadership, Greek Life Office and the Office of Residential Life.

Motionhouse Dance Theatre, one of the UK's most acclaimed troupes, will present Scattered, a dazzling tribute to the power and majesty of water, March 21 and 22.

"If amethysts could sing, they would sound like Judy Collins."
— Richard Farina.

In a career stretching more than five decades, Judy Collins has been a piano prodigy, a Greenwich Village folksinger, a social activist, a pop icon, a fearless memoirist and—of course—a chart-topping, Grammy-Award winning recording artist.

Judy Collins

Charlie Robin, executive director of Edison, notes that many of this year’s artists present fresh takes on classical traditions.

AnDa Unionrevives an all-but-vanished world of indigenous Mongolian music. The madcap improvisations of 500 Clown recall the techniques and sensibilities of commedia dell'arte. Che Malambocombines the primal, percussive energies of Argentine gauchos — the cowboys of South America — with the choreographic rigor of French ballet.

“Everywhere I looked, the productions that most excited me for this season were those that referenced the past, even ancient traditions,” Robin says. “And ultimately, what doesn’t reflect, redefine and build upon what came before?

“Whether from the grasslands of Mongolia, the plains of Argentina or the wide-open spaces of the American West, our stories help us share glimpses of how we interpret our world — be it through movement, word or song.

Avatar-alumnus Stephen Lang presents the one-man-show Beyond GloryNov. 16.

The Ovations season opens Oct. 12 with An Evening with Judy Collins. The performance, which takes place in the 560 Music Center, will benefit the Edison Education Endowment, which subsidizes tickets, workshops and transportation for local K-12 students.

AnDa Union gallops into town Oct. 20, followed Nov. 16 by actor and playwright Stephen Lang—perhaps best known for his role as Colonel Quaritch in Avatar—in Beyond Glory, an unflinching portrait of military heroism. Che Malambo rounds out the fall Nov. 22 and 23.

The spring semester opens Jan. 24 and 25 with The Wonder Bread Years, a mostly fond salute to Kool-Aid, Spam and the world gone by from former Seinfeld writer Pat Hazell. On Feb. 15, Grammy-nominated gospel singer Ruthie Fosterwill join contemporary bluesman Eric Bibbin Thanks for the Joy.

Motionhouse Dance Theatre, one of the U.K’s finest contemporary troupes, presents Scattered, a dazzling tribute to the majesty and savagery of water, March 21 and 22. The Intergalactic Nemesis, which combines live actors and sounds effects with more than 1,250 hand-drawn comic book panels, presents two shows — Book One: Target Earth(April 4) and Book Two: Robot Planet Rising (April 5).

Ovations for young people presents Black Violin March 15.

Meanwhile, back on earth, master storyteller Tim Watts will present The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer as part of the ovations for young people series Oct. 5.

Next up, on March 15, is Black Violin, a.k.a. Wilner “Wil B” Baptiste and Kevin “Kev Marcus” Sylvester, two classically trained musicians who combine classical music with jazz, funk and hip-hop.

Concluding the series April 12 will be 500 Clown in Trapped, their bouncy yet surprisingly philosophical rumination on ensnarement and escape.

Tickets and information

Tickets to An Evening with Judy Collins are $50.

All other Ovations events are $36, or $32 for seniors; $28 for Washington University faculty and staff; and $20 for students and children. Subscriptions are available at the basic level (three, four or five events at $32 per ticket) and at the premiere level (six or more events at $28 per ticket).

Ovations for young people tickets are $12 each. Subscriptions to series are $27, or $24 for WUSTL faculty and staff.

Edison Theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. The 560 Music Center is located in University City at 560 Trinity Ave. For more information or to order tickets, call the Edison Box Office at (314) 935-6543; email edison@wustl.edu or visit edison.wustl.edu.

Edison Theatre

Founded in 1973, the Edison Ovations Series serves both Washington University and the St. Louis community by providing the highest caliber national and international artists in music, dance and theater, performing new works as well as innovative interpretations of classical material not otherwise seen in St. Louis.

Edison programs are made possible with support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; and private contributors. The Ovations season is supported by The Mid-America Arts Alliance with generous underwriting by the National Endowment for the Arts and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

WUSTL Photos/herb weitman

Prof. William Gass teaches students in 1984.

A final gallery talk is also scheduled for 9 a.m. Friday, July 19, in Olin Library’s Ginkgo Reading Room (Level 1), providing a guided tour of the in-person exhibition.

Created by Washington University Libraries’ manuscripts curator, Joel Minor, and library assistant Sarah Schnuriger, the exhibition draws on the extensive archive of Gass’ literary papers housed in WUSTL Libraries’ Modern Literature Collection and includes other items on loan from Gass.

On display are items related to each of Gass’ many books — which range from novels to short-story collections to essays and literary criticism — as well as his education, World War II Navy experience, teaching career and more. 

Gass, PhD, is the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was hired as a professor of philosophy in 1969 and taught for three decades.

Visitors to the online exhibit can view drafts of published and unpublished writings, listen to recordings of Gass’ interviews and readings, and view photos and scans of important documents and objects that have shaped his life. 

Also included is an essay, “My Memories of the Service,” which Gass wrote specifically for the exhibit.

Friday’s guided tour in Olin Library will be given by Minor and is free and open to the public, but attendance is limited. The group will meet in the Ginkgo Reading Room, Level 1, and the tour will last about one hour, with time for discussion and individual exhibit viewing at the end. 

To reserve a space, call (314) 935-5495 or email spec@wulib.wustl.edu.

For more information about the William Gass Papers and other collections in the Modern Literature Collection, see the Manuscript Unit’s website.

Photo by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM.

Stone-carved representation of Maya King Chak Took Ich'aak (Red Spark Claw) who died in 556 AD. Download high-res >>

Freidel

“Great rulers took pleasure in describing adversity as a prelude to ultimate success,” said research director David Freidel, PhD, a professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “Here the Snake queen, Lady Ikoom, prevailed in the end.”

Freidel, who is studying in Paris this summer, said the stone monument, known officially as El Perú Stela 44, offers a wealth of new information about a “dark period” in Maya history, including the names of two previously unknown Maya rulers and the political realities that shaped their legacies.

“The narrative of Stela 44 is full of twists and turns of the kind that are usually found in time of war but rarely detected in Precolumbian archaeology,” Freidel said. 

Photo by Juan Carlos Pérez; courtesy of Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM.

Maya Stela 44 photographed in the tunnel below a Maya temple where it was discovered March 5, 2013.
Download high-res >>

Carved stone monuments, such as Stela 44, have been unearthed in dozens of other important Maya ruins and each has made a critical contribution to the understanding of Maya culture.

Freidel says that his epigrapher, Stanley Guenter, who deciphered the text, believes that Stela 44 was originally dedicated about 1,450 years ago, in the calendar period ending in A.D. 564, by the Wak dynasty King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin, a title that translates roughly as “He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle.”

After standing exposed to the elements for more than 100 years, Stela 44 was moved by order of a later king and buried as an offering inside new construction that took place at the main El Perú-Waka’ temple about A.D. 700, probably as part of funeral rituals for a great queen entombed in the building at this time, the research team suggests.

El Perú-Waka’ is about 40 miles west of the famous Maya site of Tikal near the San Pedro Martir River in Laguna del Tigre National Park. In the Classic period, this royal city commanded major trade routes running north to south and east to west.

Map courtesy of Keith Eppich

Map of the Maya world

Freidel has directed research at this site in collaboration with Guatemalan and foreign archaeologists since 2003. At present, Lic. Juan Carlos Pérez Calderon is co-director of the project and Olivia Navarro Farr, an assistant professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio, is co-principal investigator and long-term supervisor of work in the temple, known as Structure M13-1. Gautemalan archaeologist Griselda Perez discovered Stela 44 in this temple.

The project carries out research under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Guatemala and its Directorate for Cultural and Natural Patrimony, the Council for Protected Areas, and it is sponsored by the Foundation for the Cultural and Natural Patrimony (PACUNAM) and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Early in March, Pérez was excavating a short tunnel along the centerline of the stairway of the temple in order to give access to other tunnels leading to a royal tomb discovered in 2012 when her excavators encountered Stela 44. 

Photo courtesy of David Freidel/WUSTL

Guatemalan archaeologist Griselda Perez

Once the texts along the side of the monument were cleared, archaeologist Francisco Castaneda took detailed photographs and sent these to Guenter for decipherment.

Guenter’s glyph analysis suggests that Stela 44 was commissioned by Wak dynasty King Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin to honor his father, King Chak Took Ich’aak (Red Spark Claw), who had died in A.D. 556. Stela 44’s description of this royal father-son duo marks the first time their names have been known to modern history.

A new queen, Lady Ikoom, also is featured in the text and she was important to the king who recovered this worn stela and used it again. 

Photo by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM.

Maya Snake queen Lady Ikoom as depicted on Stela 44. Download high-res >>

Lady Ikoom was a predecessor to one of the greatest queens of Classic Maya civilization, the seventh-century Maya Holy Snake Lord known as Lady K’abel who ruled El Perú-Waka’ for more than 20 years with her husband, King K’inich Bahlam II. She was the military governor of the Wak kingdom for her family, the imperial house of the Snake King, and she carried the title “Kaloomte,” translated as “Supreme Warrior,” higher in authority than her husband, the king.

Around A.D. 700, Stela 44 was brought to the main city temple by command of King K’inich Bahlam II to be buried as an offering, probably as part of the funeral rituals for his wife, queen Kaloomte’ K’abel. 

Last year, the project discovered fragments of another stela built into the final terrace walls of the city temple, Stela 43, dedicated by this king in A.D. 702. Lady Ikoom is given pride of place on the front of that monument celebrating an event in 574. She was likely an ancestor of the king.

Photo courtesy of David Freidel/WUSTL

WUSTL archaeologist David Freidel works to uncover Stela 43, which includes one of the first known references to the Maya Snake queen Lady Ikoom. Download high-res >>

Freidel and colleagues discovered Lady K’abel’s tomb at the temple in 2012. Located near K’abel’s tomb, Stela 44 was set in a cut through the plaster floor of the plaza in front of the old temple and then buried underneath the treads of the stairway of the new temple.

Stela 44 originally was raised in a period when no stelae were erected at Tikal, a period of more than a century called The Hiatus from A.D. 557 until 692. This was a turbulent era in Maya history during which there were many wars and conquests. Tikal’s hiatus started when it was defeated in battle by King Yajawte’ K’inich of Caracol in Belize, probably under the auspices of the Snake King Sky Witness. The kingdom of Waka’ also experienced a hiatus that was likely associated with changing political fortunes but one of briefer duration from A.D. 554 to 657. That period is now shortened by the discovery of Stela 44.

The front of the stela is much eroded, no doubt from more than a century of exposure, but it features a king standing face forward cradling a sacred bundle in his arms. There are two other stelae at the site with this pose, Stela 23 dated to 524 and Stela 22 dated to 554, and they were probably raised by King Chak Took Ich’aak. The name Chak Took Ich’aak is that of two powerful kings of Tikal and it is likely that this king of Waka’ was named after them and that his dynasty was a Tikal vassal at the time he came to the throne, the research team suggests.

The text describes the accession of the son of Chak Took Ich’aak, Wa’oom Uch’ab Tzi’kin, in A.D. 556 as witnessed by a royal woman Lady Ikoom, who was probably his mother. She carries the titles Sak Wayis, White Spirit, and K’uhul Chatan Winik, Holy Chatan Person. These titles are strongly associated with the powerful Snake or Kan kings who commanded territories to the north of El Perú-Waka’, which makes it very likely that Lady Ikoom was a Snake princess, Guenter argues.

Photo by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM.

Maya Snake queen Lady Ikoom as represented on Stela 43.
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“Then in a dramatic shift in the tides of war that same Tikal King, Wak Chan K’awiil, was defeated and sacrificed by the Snake king in A.D. 562. Finally, two years after that major reversal, the new king and his mother raised Stela 44, giving the whole story as outlined above.”

Stela 44’s tales of political intrigue and bloodshed are just a few of the many dramatic stories of Classic Maya history that have been recovered through the decipherment of Maya glyphs, a science that has made great strides in the last 30 years, Freidel said.

Freidel and his project staff will continue to study Stela 44 for more clues about the nuances of Maya history. While the text on Stela 44 is only partially preserved, it clearly reveals an important moment in the history of Waka’, he concludes. 

Editor's Note: Science writers seeking a more detailed technical explanation of the findings and related research may click here for a downloadable technical summary of the project that was jointly written by the research team.