Motionhouse Dance Theatre brings “Scattered” to Edison Theatre March 21 and 22. Photos by Chris Nash. Download hires image.
Water.
It is the source of life, the indispensible molecule, the elemental force that carves rivers, topples mountains, nurtures crops and extinguishes flame.
In “Scattered,” Motionhouse Dance Theatre— one of the United Kingdom’s foremost touring companies — combines daring movement, mid-air acrobatics and state-of-the-art projection technology to capture the might, majesty and savagery of water.
On Friday and Saturday, March 21 and 22, Motionhouse will bring this audacious, physics-defying program to St. Louis as part of the Edison Ovations Series at Washington University.
A world of water
Subtitled “A meteor shower of unlikely moments,” “Scattered” explores the human relationship with water in all its mutable forms and breathtaking environments.
The evening-length work unfolds on a giant curved cyclorama, resembling a skateboarder’s half-pipe, which doubles as a projection screen. Seven dancers, often outfitted with aerial harnesses, face down rainstorms and tumble down waterfalls. They brave rolling currents and oceanic depths. They stagger through parched deserts and slide across ice and snow.
“We truly live in a world of water — the Earth is not called the blue planet for nothing!” said artistic director Kevin Finnan, who co-founded Motionhouse with Louise Richards in 1988. “We cannot live without it; it is fundamental to our existence, and we are born of fluid. Yet we only notice it when we have too much or too little of it.
“Water sustains our bodies” and is also their principal component, Finnan added. Without water, “our bodies would be crushed by gravity.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer called “Scattered” “joyous, tender, frenetic, disturbing, funny and absolutely thrilling.” The Times (U.K.) added that, “The performance is practically jet-propelled — the quicksilver cast almost never stops moving. Dazzling.”
“Motionhouse like to leave their audiences physically disarranged – gobsmacked, stunned, overawed,” added The Guardian. “With a cast of super-athletic dancers, as dexterous in the air with ropes as they are powerful on the floor, this is a company that has long cornered the high-impact end of the dance market."
Performances of “Scattered” will begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 21 and 22. Tickets are $36, or $32 seniors, $28 for WUSTL faculty and staff and $20 for students and children.
Tickets are available at the Edison Box Office, located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.; and online, at edison.wustl.edu. For more information, call 314-935-6543 or email edison@wustl.edu.
Edison programs are made possible with support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; and private contributors.
People often feel draggy the day after they have to set their clocks forward in the spring but often shrug off that feeling as trivial. In fact, says Erik Herzog, PhD, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies biological clocks, jamming our biological clocks into reverse, as daylight savings time does, has serious consequences.
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"Daylight saving time does not seem to help conserve energy, one of its original goals. Instead, the evidence is that the one hour advance of our wall clocks each spring is associated with statistically higher rates of traffic accidents over the following three days and heart attacks over the following two days," Herzog said.
A still from "Alaskaland," directed by Chinonye Chukwu.
Growing up in rural Alaska, Chukwuma is caught between American friends and traditional Nigerian parents. But when a family tragedy sends life spiraling out of control, Chukwana discovers that the best hope for salvation may be his estranged sister, Chidinma.
So begins “Alaskaland,” the debut feature from Chinonye Chukwu, a Nigerian-born director who was herself raised in Fairbanks. Later this month, “Alaskaland” will be one of eight films screened as part of Washington University’s annual African Film Festival.
Screenings begin at 7 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, March 28, 29 and 30. A special youth matinee will begin at 1 p.m. Saturday. On Sunday night, Chukwu will introduce “Alaskaland” and host a Q&A immediately afterwards.
All events are free and open to the public and take place in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the university’s Danforth Campus.
Now in its ninth year, the African Film Festival is organized by Wilmetta Toliver-Diallo, Ph.D., assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and senior lecturer in African & African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences.
“Our festival’s development has advanced so much from its initial concept because it has been so well-received by our campus and St. Louis regional communities,” says Toliver-Diallo. “We continue to enjoy bringing diverse voices together to witness magic on screen and discuss it afterwards. This helps us to grow our audience.”
The 2014 festival is based on the theme “coming of age” — a term that applies both to the films’ subject matter and many of the creators.
“This year’s collection features filmmakers less established than those featured in previous years, but who have more formal training than the first generation of African filmmakers,” says Toliver-Diallo. “For this reason — and with advances in the digitization of the industry — audiences will see the continued evolution of the film industry in the vast continent and can make comparisons regionally.
“I am most excited about 'Aya of Yop City' (Ivory Coast) and 'Tey' (Senegal),” adds Toliver-Diallo. “They are both very different films. 'Tey' swept the awards [at the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, or FESPACO] for direction, best picture, and best actor. It is a great to see Saul Williams, of slam poetry fame, back on screen and very compelling as a Senegalese man who returns home to spend his last day on earth.
“'Aya' is an animated film — though not for very young audiences — that really captures Ivorian pop culture in the 1970s, but makes a statement to young women on the importance of independence when making life choices, especially as your peers might be doing otherwise.”
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"Aya of Yop City," directed by Marguerite Abouet.
Sponsors
The festival is sponsored by Washington University’ African and African-American Studies Program and its Film and Media Studies Program, both in Arts & Sciences; the African Students Association; and the Brown School African Students Association, which will lead a post-show discussion each evening.
Additional funding is provided by a grant from the Women’s Society of Washington University and by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
“The film festival allows for a different type of reflection and perspective on the African continent,” says Caleb Edwards, president of the African Students Association. “The films are crafted with first-hand experiences in order to give a glimpse on how Africans interpret and respond to the stories/events of the continent that we only get to know about second-hand.”
Other supporters include the Saint Louis Art Museum, which will provide thematically related crafts to attendees at the youth matinee. The Saint Louis Metropolitan Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and Saint Louis Missouri-Senegal Sister Cities will sponsor a reception Saturday evening, following the screening of “Tey.”
Schedule of Events
7 p.m. Friday, March 28
"Unspoken" Sunny King, Nigeria/UK, 2013, 10 minutes (In English) Two days before Lola’s dream wedding, her maid of honour stumbles on a secret that could change all of their lives forever. Unspoken is a story of commitment to love and friendship in the face of societal taboos we dare not confront.
Official Selection, Pan African Film Festival, 2014
"Aya of Yop City" Marguerite Abouet, Ivory Coast/ France, 2013, 85 minutes (French with English subtitles) Against the colorful and spirited backdrop of the Ivory Coast in the 1970s, "Aya" is a vibrant, beautifully animated film. From teen romance to parental tribulations, a rare glimpse into African daily lives, set to the funky sounds of a groovy soundtrack.
Youth matinee 1 p.m. Saturday, March 29
"Money Tree" and "Imprint" Hawanatu Bangura, Sierra Leone/Australia, 2011, 7 minutes and 4 minutes respectively (In English) Money Tree is a short animated film about a young boy who wants to become rich by planting a stolen coin. Imprint examines the significance of passing down a dance tradition from one generation to the next.
"Felix" Roberta Durrant, South Africa, 2013, 97 minutes (In English) Thirteen-year-old Felix Xaba dreams of becoming a saxophonist like his late father, but his mother thinks jazz is the devil’s music. When Felix takes a scholarship at an elitist private school, he defies his mother and turns to two aging members of his father’s old band to help him prepare for the school jazz concert.
Best Director, African International Film Festival, 2013
Audience Award, Durban International Film Festival, 2013
7 p.m. Saturday, March 29
"Bone Shaker" Frances Bodomo, Ghana/USA, 2013, 13 minutes (In English) An African family, lost in America, travels to a Louisiana church to find a cure for their troubled child.
Nomination, Best Short, Sundance, 2013
Nomination, Best Short, Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2013
"Tey" Alain Gomis, Senegal/France, 2012, 86 minutes (In Wolof with English subtitles) What would you do if you knew today was your last day on earth? A joyous, impressionistic celebration of life and death, "Tey" follows Satché from the moment he wakes, with full knowledge of his imminent passing. Satché reminisces about his friends and family, reflecting on the choices he has made and their consequences.
Special Jury Prize, Narrative Feature, River Run International Film Festival, 2013
Golden Stallion, Best Film, FESPACO, 2013
Best Actor, FESPACO, 2013
7 p.m. Sunday, March 30
"Faisal Goes West" Bentley Brown, USA/Sudan, 2013, 34 minutes (In English and Arabic with English subtitles) Faisal and his family come to America in search of a better life. Unfortunately, they have to battle an economic crisis along with cultural and linguistic barriers. Faisal realizes that he is not prepared for his dream of attending an American university, and he begins looking for work. His friend promises to find Faisal a job. After a journey by bus and train, the two arrive at a chicken farm. Only through trials and hardship, can Faisal learn the tough lessons necessary to gain ground in his new homeland.
Best Original Narrative Short, Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, 2013
Official Selection, London Short Film Festival, 2013
"Alaskaland" Chinonye Chukwu, USA/Nigeria, 2012, 75 minutes (In English) "Alaskaland" tells the story of Chukwuma, an Alaska-raised Nigerian struggling to balance his cultural heritage with the pressures of the world around him. After a family tragedy forces a two-year estrangement from his younger sister, Chidinma, the siblings reconnect in their hometown. Although their time apart has created new frictions, they find their reconciliation bringing them closer to each other and to their roots in this gorgeous debut film.
Official Selection, Chicago International Film Festival, 2012
Q&A with filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu following the film
Joseph Orkin, a graduate student in anthropology, describes using a dog named Pinkerton to find the droppings of black-crested gibbons on forest floors in China. Orkin is using the DNA from scat to see if the critically endangered gibbons have become genetically isolated in mountaintop forests as terraced fields have moved relentlessly up the mountainsides.
When scientists at a party are asked what they do for a living, their answers are often greeted with blank stares and followed by an uncomfortable silence. One lunar scientist tired of making nonscientists feel uncomfortable, just tells them he “contemplates the moon.”
The frustration of the scientists is understandable and so is the dismay of their nonscientist interlocutors. After all articles in science journals these days have titles like “The R882H DNMT3A Mutation Associated with AML Dominantly Inhibits WT DNMT3A by Blocking its Ability to Form Active Tetramers.” That’s terrifying stuff, if you can’t decode any of it.
Scientists, especially young ones, don’t accept this standoff and are trying to figure out how to get back in touch with the American public. One testing ground for their skill is FameLab, a science communications competition sponsored by National Geographic and NASA that was recently held at Washington University in St. Louis.
Participants craft a three-minute talk on their research or a related topic, which is then critiqued in a rehearsal for the competition, where 10 finalists give their talks in public.
Joseph Orkin, a graduate studcnt in anthropology won both the “audience’s choice” and “judge’s choice” awards at the St. Louis FameLab, advancing to the national competition. Orkin repeated his three-minute presentation for the Record; you can listen to it below.
Amanda Melin, assistant professor of anthropology, studies the effect of color vision on the ability of white-faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica to find fruit. Here, she explains that some types of color blindness might be an advantage rather than a liability. After all, color-blind soldiers make better snipers because they are able to "see through" camouflage. A "wild card" winner, she also advanced to the national competition.
What the judges said about science communication
Only people with nerves of steel volunteer for this event. Keynote speaker and evolutionary anthropologist Kenny Broad, PhD, who cave-dives for science and, not incidentally, also studies how we misjudge risk, told the audience that people rate public speaking as the scariest of all scary things. Second on the list is death.
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Cole Pruitt, a doctoral candidate in chemistry in the nuclear sciences group, wields lasagna noodles as he explains the nuclear "pasta" that forms after a supernova event. This is not a metaphor — at least not entirely. Astrophysicists actually speak of spaghetti and lasagna-like phases in the nuclear goo that forms within neutron stars.
To be successful in this forum — on stage and above the audience — the contestants have to be actors as well as scientists. Think Bill Nye the Science Guy or Neil deGrasse Tyson, narrator of the remake of "Cosmos."
So during the rehearsals, some of the judges' tips were directed at the quality of voice acting. "Vary the cadence," presenters were told. "It will make you sound less scripted." "Don't end sentences with a dying fall, which betrays that you're already thinking about the sentence to come. "
But most of the feedback was directed at the central difficulty of communicating science to the public: How do you describe in three minutes something it took you years to understand?
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Molly Stanley, a graduate student in neuroscience, explaining that high blood-sugar levels may make Alzheimer's disease plaques more toxic to the brain.
Well, first off, the judges made it abundantly clear, you can't use the vocabulary of science. Don't say "selective advantage." Forget "heterozygous." Discard "alleles," and abandon "reproductive success." One judge, the Simon Cowell of the three, even asked, "Are you sure people know chimpanzees live in Africa? Or, for that matter, where Africa is?"
The judges also were very tough on the 'So what?' question. 'Why should people care how elements are made in supernova explosions, or why pulsars suddenly speed up instead of slowing down?' they asked. By the way, what is a "pulsar" when it's at home?
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Kevin Forsberg, a graduate student in the Molecular Genetics and Genomics program, said that 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to livestock to make them grow faster — not to cure sick animals or people — and that this has everything to do with the emergence of antibiotic resistance.
The reminder is always useful, though some things, including supernova explosions and pulsars, are interesting in and of themselves. As Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the
cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have
you HEARD THIS?”
What's so special about science?
Scientists have been bothered by the lack of public understanding of science for a long time now — at least since the Sputnik era ran out of gas in the mid-1980s and the shine fell off Newton's apple.
Annoyed members of the public sometimes ask, "What's so special about science?" After all, nobody understands what lawyers or mechanics do either.
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Eric Hamilton, a graduate student in the Plant and Microbial Biosciences program, said that when a plant seed comes out of dormancy and gets ready to grow by rehydrating, it can overshoot the mark, swelling up like a water balloon attached to fire hydrant and bursting.
Although it may be dangerous to say so out loud, many scientists would claim exceptionalism for science. Science pervades our society, they would say. Our prosperity and our health are based on it. Science is entwined with many, if not most, policy issues of national and international importance and a wide range of personal activities. The world can tolerate a few people who believe impossible things, but once there are too many, we begin to make bad collective decisions, ones that eventually bump up hard against the laws of the universe.
Worries about public understanding of science aren't new; what's new is scientists' recognition that they must do a better job of communicating with the public.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press polled Americans about their views of science and polled scientists about their views of Americans. They found that while Americans tend to have positive views of the scientific community, scientists tend to consider the public ignorant (and the media irresponsible).
Or, as a pamphlet summarizing recent American Academy of Arts & Sciences workshops on science communication put it: "The problem is not that the public needs to understand more science but rather that scientists need to understand more public."
Classical violinist Cecilia Belcher (pictured) joins pianist Patti Wolf to launch KWUR Week March 18.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed violin sonatas as a child of six. But it was as a young man, visiting Paris at age 22, that he created his first mature works in the form. Sonata in D Major, K. 306, is boisterous, inventive and slyly humorous — grandly scaled fun that only Mozart could write.
At 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 18, acclaimed violinist Cecilia Belcher and pianist Patti Wolf will present the D Major sonata, along with works by Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, in the 560 Music Center at Washington University in St. Louis.
The free concert will launch KWUR Week 2014. Subsequent events will range from rock and funk to classical percussion. Performers include:
Tweens and Japanther 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 19 The Gargoyle
All four concerts are open to the public and free with a WUSTL ID. For more information, visit kwur.com/kwurweek.
Belcher, a native of St. Louis, is second principal violin with the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston. She currently is performing with the St. Louis Symphony for its 2013-14 season and also plays with The Knights, a New York-based chamber orchestra. She holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Rice University.
Wolf trained at the St. Louis Conservatory before earning degrees at the Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. She performs regularly with the St. Louis Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis and the Chautauqua Symphony in New York. A former visiting professor at WUSTL’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, she maintains an active private studio.
Washington University presents Harold Pinter's "Betrayal" March 27-30. Pictured are Sarah Palay as Emma, Charles Morris as Robert and Conner McEvoy as Jerry. Photos by Jerry Naunheim Jr./WUSTL Photos. Download hires image.
Emma sits at a corner table. Jerry arrives with wine and bitters. It’s the end of the affair and the start of the play.
In "Betrayal," Harold Pinter traces a years-long adulterous relationship in reverse chronological order—a clever structural device, but one that begs a profound question. Knowing the height of the fall, would you still jump?
“Pinter was really quite experimental,” says Annamaria Pileggi, professor of the practice in drama. “Other than the order in which it’s told, 'Betrayal' is probably the most realistic of his plays. The language is sparse but loaded with subtext.
“It’s quintessentially British,” adds Pileggi, who will direct "Betrayal" March 27-30 for the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences. “It’s brutal, but couched in civility.”
Written in 1978, "Betrayal" is loosely based on Pinter’s longtime affair with BBC reporter Joan Bakewell, who was married to Michael Bakewell, the author’s friend and head of plays for the BBC drama department.
The story centers on Emma, a gallery owner; Robert, her publisher husband; and Jerry, a literary agent who was best man at their wedding. In nine short scenes, packed into an uninterrupted 90 minutes, Pinter reverses the trajectory of the conventional morality tale, unpeeling the deceptions, disloyalties, alibis and humiliations that stem from a single, selfish moment.
Initial reviews were harsh. The Guardian’s Michael Billington decried “the pitifully thin strip of human experience it explores.” But in the years since, "Betrayal" has come to be seen as a highlight of Pinter’s Nobel Prize-winning career.
Billington himself reversed course. “Having dismissed Pinter's play at its 1978 premiere,” he wrote in 2003, “I have spent the last quarter-century catching up with it. Each time I see it I discover something new…”
A play is really a blueprint
Pileggi, who has taught "Betrayal" in the classroom for years, notes that this is her first time directing Pinter on stage.
“It's really not the same,” she says. “Pinter is a wonderful craftsman and wordsmith, but his work exemplifies the idea that a play is really a blueprint. It’s not a novel or poem; its not fully realized on the page. You don’t fully experience it until you see it embodied. He’s constantly shifting the earth beneath your feet.
“The actors are struggling—in a very good way—with the play’s emotional violence,” Pileggi continues. “It’s a workout, and a roller coaster. Frankly, I don't know many college actors who could handle this material, but all three leads are exceeding my expectations. They’ve really prepared themselves.
Indeed, given the raw subject matter, Pileggi admits that she was surprised by how relaxed and jovial rehearsals have proven.
“People are animated, joking around, having a good time,” she says. “As a director and teacher, it’s very interesting to watch how the actors take care of themselves.
“As a play, 'Betrayal' is much like the affair it depicts,” she concludes. “It just kind of sweeps you up, takes you away for 90 minutes, and then its over.”
Cast and crew
Three seniors star in the principal roles: Sarah Palay as Emma, Charles Morris as Robert and Conner McEvoy as Jerry. Sophomore Joe Holley rounds out the cast of four as a pub waiter.
Scenic and costume design are by Rob Morgan, senior lecturer in drama, and Bonnie Kruger, professor of the practice in drama, respectively. Lighting and sound are by junior David Levitt and sophomore David Ingraham.
Senior Rachel Blumer is assistant director. Junior Claire Stark is stage manager.
Tickets
"Betrayal" begins at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, March 27 and 28; at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, March 29; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 30. Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.
Tickets are $15, or $10 for students, seniors and Washington University faculty and staff, and are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, PhD, explains the positive impact of contemplative practices such as meditation on brain activity. Behind him is an image of a Tibetan Buddhist monk being fitted with sensors to record brain activity while meditating.
More than 500 people assembled in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis on March 5 to hear renowned neuroscientist Richard Davidson, PhD, deliver the annual Witherspoon Memorial Lecture on Religion and Science.
During his talk, "Change Your Brain by Transforming Your Mind," he explained the science behind his findings on the positive impact of contemplative practices such as meditation on brain activity.
After the presentation, people gathered in the Danforth University Center's Goldberg Formal Lounge for a reception and book signing.
Davidson is the Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and director of both the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, all at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, he established the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
Davidson also gave a department colloquium March 6 on "Order and Disorder in the Emotional Brain." Both lectures were recorded and soon will be available on the Assembly Series website.
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Mary Butkus/WUSTL Photos
(From left) Beata Grant, PhD, professor of Chinese language and literature and director of the Religious Studies program, all in Arts & Sciences, and Randall Larsen, PhD, the William R. Stuckenberg Professor of Human Values and Moral Development and chair of psychology, also in Arts & Sciences, visit with Davidson in the Danforth University Center after his lecture.
A photograph of Comet ISON (Comet C/2012 S1), which originated in the Oort Cloud, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope Oct. 9, 2013. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
At the far edge of the solar system, nearly a full light-year from the Earth, lies the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of icy comets representing the furthest reaches of the sun’s gravitational influence.
In Oort Cloud (2011), composer Shannon Wood offers a lyrical depiction of Oort Cloud comets, dislodged by the pull of the large outer planets, plunging towards the sun and, occasionally, rebounding along hyperbolic trajectories and into interstellar space.
At 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 23, Wood, principal timpanist of the St. Louis Symphony, will bring Oort Cloud to Washington University as part of the of the symphony’s Community Partnership Program.
Cosponsored by KWUR and Student Union, the evening will highlight a series of contemporary percussive works. In addition to Oort Cloud, the program will include compositions by Preston Stahly, Richard Schwarz and CRASH, the trash can drum group organized by WUSTL Beat Therapy Ensemble.
The free performance begins at 7:30 p.m. in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, located at 560 Trinity Ave. in University City.
For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.
An evening of contemporary percussion
The program will open with Kestrel (1984), a work for flute, harp and percussion by contemporary composer Preston Stahly. Joining Wood will be flutist Ann Choomack and harpist Allegra Lilly, both also of the St. Louis Symphony.
Wood then will perform Richard Schwarz’s Brujo (1981), a piece for solo percussion inspired by the Dagari People of Ghana, West Africa. Next, Wood will join the seven members of CRASH—Rohan Khazanchi, Anu Goel, Graham Day, Jacob Nydegger, Lorraine Kung, Rebecca Yang and Zack Schultz—for Improvisation for Nontraditional Percussion Instruments (2014).
Concluding the concert will be Oort Cloud. Joining Wood will be Choomack and Lilly, as well as the St. Louis Symphony’s Erin Schrieber, violin; Christian Woehr, viola; David Kim, cello; Timothy Zavadil, clarinet; and Will James, percussion. Conductor will be Steven Jarvi, who leads the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra.
Shannon Wood
Prior to joining the St. Louis Symphony, Wood held positions with the Charleston Symphony, the Naples Philharmonic, the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra and the Grand Rapids Symphony. He has toured extensively as both an orchestral and chamber musician and performed with more than a dozen symphonies throughout Europe, New Zealand, South America, Asia and the United States. In addition, Wood owns and operates malletshop.com, a source for vintage mallet percussion instruments and timpani.
WUSTL Beat Therapy
WUSTL Beat Therapy is a community outreach organization serving the Greater St. Louis Area through music education and music therapy. Founded in 2011 by Jason Liang and Prateek Kumar, it provides opportunities for WUSTL students and student groups to participate in music-based volunteer programming.
St. Louis Symphony Community Partnership program
Guest musicians for the performance are sponsored by the St. Louis Symphony’s Community Partnerships program, which presents more than 250 free events, concerts, and classes each year throughout the greater St. Louis area. For more information about upcoming events, or to find out how you can help, please visit the Community and Education section of the St. Louis Symphony website, www.stlsymphony.org, or call (314) 286-4432.
NASA called it “seven minutes of terror.” In August 2012, the world watched to see if the Mars Curiosity rover, a one-ton robot hurtling toward the red planet at 13,200 mph, would gently land on the surface or explode on contact.
The planned landing allowed for zero margin of error.
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Steltzner
Adam Steltzner, PhD, the engineer in charge of the highly delicate landing feat, will tell how “Curiosity Changed My Life” for the Assembly Series. His presentation will begin at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, in Graham Chapel on Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth Campus; it is free and open to the public.
As we now know, Steltzner’s team executed a perfect landing, made all the more dazzling considering their leader flunked geometry and dropped out of high school to join a rock band. His father told him he would never amount to more than a
ditch digger.
One night, however, he noticed that the Orion constellation was in a different place than earlier that evening. Steltzner decided he wanted to know all he could about space, so he earned his GED, followed by a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a PhD in engineering physics.
WUSTL has its own cadre of experts when it comes to exploring Mars. As deputy principal investigator of the dual-rover Mars missions, planetary scientist Ray Arvidson, PhD, has had the opportunity to give his students hands-on training. That in turn has led to a sizable alumni group currently employed by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Read more about WUSTL's Mars rover connection.
Maud Casey's third novel, "The Man Who Walked Away," was released earlier this month. On March 20, she'll read from her work as part of The Writing Program's Reading Series.
It was as though he had always been there, haunting the landscape, if only you were paying attention.
— From “The Man Who Walked Away”
Albert wanders Europe in a fugue state. Across the French countryside, to Prague, Vienna and Moscow, he is taken for a madman, chased by suspicious villagers and imprisoned by local authorities. When the walking ends, Albert finds himself with no memory of his travels and no answers for his confusion and anguish.
In “The Man Who Walked Away,” acclaimed novelist Maud Casey explores both Albert’s journeys and his relationship with the doctor who sought to reassemble his life. Inspired by a real-life case, the book alternates chapters between its two protagonists, providing an empathetic yet rigorous chronicle of both Albert’s plight and confident compulsions of 19th-century medicine.
On Thursday, March 20, Casey will read from her work as part of The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences’ spring Reading Series. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 8 p.m. in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and book signing immediately will follow.
For more information, call 314-935-7428.
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Maud Casey
Casey is the author of two previous novels — “The Shape of Things to Come,” a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and “Genealogy,” a New York Times Editor's Choice Book — as well as “Drastic,” a collection of stories.
An associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, she also teaches in the low-residency master of fine arts program at Warren Wilson College and was a faculty member at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in 2009. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Casey’s many honors include international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso and the Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, as well as the 2008 Calvino Prize and a 2008-09 D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship.
Jason Phelps, Danu Uribe and Chris Gibson in "The Intergalactic Nemesis." Photos by Sarah Bork Hamilton. Hires versions upon request.
What’s a long-awaited threat, born of outer space and a danger to life as we know it?
Why, it’s"The Intergalactic Nemesis," of course. Part old-time radio play and part multi-media graphic novel, this unique science fiction serial first descended on St. Louis in 2011. Now intrepid reporter Molly Sloan is back, fighting to save the world from secret assassins, sinister robots and a mysterious former fiancé.
On Friday, April 4, "The Intergalactic Nemesis, Book One: Target Earth" — the opening installment of a projected Nemesis trilogy — will return to Washington University as part of the Edison Ovations Series.
Then, on Saturday, April 5, the action will continue with the St. Louis debut of "The Intergalactic Nemesis, Book Two: Robot Planet Rising." Both shows begin at 8 p.m.
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Danu Uribe in "The Intergalactic Nemesis."
The Intergalactic Nemesis
The brainchild of director Jason Neulander, "The Intergalactic Nemesis" began life in 1996 in a coffeehouse in Austin, TX. In the years since, Neulander and his cast of five—three actors, one keyboardist and one foley artist—have toured the nation and abroad. They’ve debuted on Broadway and sold-out the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
"Book One: Target Earth" opens in 1933. Molly, accompanied by her trusty assistant Timmy Mendez, treks across the Carpathian Mountains, chasing a tip about international pelt smuggling. But when a new contact unveils a strange map — and promptly falls to an assassin’s blade — the pair, joined by enigmatic librarian Ben Wilcott, set out on a globe-trotting adventure that leads from rural Rumania to the Robot Planet and Imperial Zygon.
"Book Two: Robot Planet Rising" opens with the disappearance of robot emissary Elbee-Dee-Oh. Molly sets off for a deep-space rescue mission while Tim begins mastering his telekinetic powers. Yet complication ensue, in the form of Dr. Lawrence Webster, Molly’s former fiancé, who miraculously appears on Robonovia. Meanwhile, the sinister robot Alphatron and duplicitous Soviet spy Natasha Zorokov start closing in.
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Jason Phelps in "The Intergalactic Nemesis."
Critical praise
Conan O’Brien calls "The Intergalactic Nemesis" “fascinating,” while the New York Post lauds it as “Great fun!… [A] happily retro multimedia extravaganza!”
“Despite the recent rash of Marvel-funded feature films, movie theaters aren’t the only place where comic-book credits roll across the screen,” says the Austin-American Statesman. “'Nemesis' harkens back to an earlier time in American entertainment while simultaneously venturing into a potential future of inter-planetary warfare.”
"The Intergalactic Nemesis, Book One: Target Earth" begins at 8 p.m. Friday, April 4.
"The Intergalactic Nemesis, Book Two: Robot Planet Rising," begins at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 5.
Tickets are $36, or $32 seniors, $28 for Washington University faculty and staff and $20 for students and children.
Tickets are available at the Edison Box Office, located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.; and online, at edison.wustl.edu. For more information, call (314) 935-6543 or e-mail edison@wustl.edu.
Edison programs are made possible with support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; and private contributors.
Yehuda Ben-Shahar, PhD, assistant professor of biology, (left) and Xingguo Zheng, a PhD candidate in neuroscience and co-author on the paper, examining fruit flies in the lab.
Our genome, we are taught, operates by sending instructions for the manufacture of proteins from DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the protein-synthesizing machinery in the cytoplasm. These instructions are conveyed by a type of molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA).
Francis Crick , co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, called the one-way flow of information from DNA to mRNA to protein the “central dogma of molecular biology.”
Yehuda Ben-Shahar and his team at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that some mRNAs have a side job unrelated to making the protein they encode. They act as regulatory molecules as well, preventing other genes from making protein by marking their mRNA molecules for destruction.
“Our findings show that mRNAS, which are typically thought to act solely as the template for protein translation, can also serve as regulatory RNAs, independent of their protein-coding capacity,” Ben-Shahar said. “They’re not just messengers but also actors in their own right.” The finding was published in the March 18 issue of the new open-access journal eLife.
Although Ben-Shahar’s team, which included neuroscience graduate student Xingguo Zheng and collaborators Aaron DiAntonio and his graduate student Vera Valakh, was studying heat stress in fruit flies when they made this discovery, he suspects this regulatory mechanism is more general than that.
Many other mRNAs, including ones important to human health, will be found to be regulating the levels of proteins other than the ones they encode. Understanding mRNA regulation may provide new purchase on health problems that haven’t yielded to approaches based on Crick’s central dogma.
Is gene expression regulated directly? Ben-Shahar’s original objective was to better understand how organisms maintain their physiological balance when they are buffeted by changes in the environment.
Neuroscientists know that if you warm neurons in culture, he said, the neurons will fire more rapidly. And if the culture is cooled down, the neurons slow down. Neurons in an organism, however, behave differently from those in a dish. Usually the organism is able to cushion its nervous system from heat stress, at least within limits. But nobody knew how they did this.
As a fruit fly scientist, Ben-Shahar was aware that there are mutations in fruit flies that make them bad at buffering heat stress, and this provided a starting point for his research.
One of these genes is actually called seizure, because flies with a broken copy of this gene are particularly sensitive to heat. Raising the temperature even 10 degrees sends them into seizures. “They seize very fast, in seconds,” Ben-Shahar said.
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Watch for the sei larvae at 38 °C. Fruitflies (or in this case their larvae) are most comfortable at a temperature of about 25 °C (77 °F). If the temperature rises to 38 °C (100 °F, larvae with a broken seizure (sei) gene begin to twitch uncontrollaby. Normal (wild type) larvae are much less affected by the heat. However, larvae with a broken pickpocket29 (ppk29) gene are unusually resistant to heat stress. So sei and ppk29 have opposite effects on the ability to the flies handle heat.
“When we looked at seizure (sei) we noticed that there is another gene on the opposite strand of the double-stranded DNA molecule called pickpocket 29 (ppk29),” Ben-Shahar said. This was interesting because seizure codes for a protein “gate” that lets potassium ions out of the neuron and pickpocket 29 codes for a gate that lets sodium ions into the neuron.
Neurons are “excitable” cells, he said, because they tightly control the gradients of potassium and sodium across their cell membranes. Rapid changes in these gradients cause a nerve to “fire,” to stop firing, and to repolarize, so that it can fire again.
The scientists soon showed that transcription of these genes is coordinated. When the flies are too hot, they make more transcripts of the sei gene and fewer of ppk29. And when the flies cooled down, the opposite happened. If the central dogma held in this case, the neurons might be buffering the effects of heat by altering the expression of these genes.
One problem with this idea, though, is that gene transcription is slow and the flies, remember, seize in seconds. Was this mechanism fast enough to keep up with sudden changes in the environment?
Does RNA interference regulate gene expression? But the scientists had also noticed that the two genes overlapped a bit at their tips. The tips, called the 3' UTRs (untranslated regions), don’t code for protein but are transcribed into mRNA.
That got them thinking. When the two genes were transcribed into mRNA, the two ends would complement one another like the hooks and loops of a Velcro fastener. Like the hooks and loops, they would want to stick together, forming a short section of double-stranded mRNA. And double-stranded mRNA, they knew, activates biochemical machinery that degrades any mRNA molecules with the same genetic sequence.
http://youtu.be/Bkumtj7EJcE
The results in a nutshell
Double-stranded RNA binds to a protein complex called Dicer that cuts it into fragments. Another protein complex, RISC, binds these fragments. One of the RNA strands is eliminated but the other remains bound to the RISC complex. RISC and its attached RNA then becomes a heat-seeking missile that finds and destroys other copies of the same RNA. If the mRNA molecules disappear, their corresponding proteins are never made.
It turned out that heat sensitivity in the fly is all about potassium channel, said Ben-Shahar. What if, he thought, the two mRNAs stuck together, the mRNA segment encoding the potassium channel was bound to RISC and other copies of the potassium channel mRNA were destroyed. This was another, potentially faster way the neurons might be controlling the excitability of their membranes.
A designer fly provides an answer Which is it? Is regulation occurring at the gene level or the mRNA level?
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To find out, the scientists made designer fruit flies that had various combinations of the genes and their sticky noncoding ends. One of these transgenic fly lines was missing the part of the gene coding for the ppk29 protein but still made lots of mRNA copies of the sticky bit at the end of ppk29. When there were lots of these isolated sticky bits, sei mRNA levels dropped. This fly was as heat sensitive as a fly completely missing the sei gene.
This combination of genotype and phenotype held the answer to the regulatory problem. First of all, mRNA from one gene (ppk29) is regulating the mRNA of another gene (sei). And, second, the regulatory part of ppk29 is the untranslated bit at the end of the mRNA. When this bit sticks to a complete transcript of the sei gene (including, of course, its sticky bit), the RISC machinery destroys any copies of the sei mRNA it finds.
So the gene that codes for a sodium channel regulates the expression of the potassium channel gene. And it does so after the genes are transcribed into mRNA; it’s mRNA-dependent regulation.
The interaction between sei and ppk29 is unlikely to be unique, Ben-Shahar said. The potassium channel is highly conserved among species, and analyses of the genome sequences in flies and in people show that two of three fly genes for this type of potassium channel and three of eight human genes for these channels have overlapping 3' UTR ends, just as do sei and ppk29.
Why does this regulatory mechanism exist? Ben-Shahar hates getting out in front of his data, but he points out that transcribing DNA into mRNA is a slower process than translating mRNA into protein. So it may be, he said, that neurons maintain a pool of mRNAs in readiness, and mRNA interference is a way to quickly knock down that pool to prevent the extra mRNA from being translated into proteins that might get the organism in trouble.
Anna Hood (right), a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in psychology in Arts & Sciences, explains her work to judge Taryn Marashi, a graduate student in Islamic studies, also in Arts & Sciences. Hood’s research examines Phenylketonuria (PKU), a metabolic genetic disorder, and how variability (fluctuations) in Phenylalanine (Phe), an essential amino acid, predicts lower intelligence and poorer executive abilities in children with PKU.
With topics ranging from African-American women survivors of breast cancer to transgender experiences, more than 55 graduate and professional students from all Washington University in St. Louis disciplines participated in the 19th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium, held Feb. 22 in Whitaker Hall.
The event provides graduate and professional students the opportunity to present their work to a broad audience of students, faculty and community members from diverse backgrounds, while allowing them to practice and hone their communication skills.
The Graduate Student Senate (GSS) holds the event in collaboration with the Association of Graduate Engineering Students and the Graduate Professional Council. The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences lends extensive support.
“The ability to describe one’s work to a variety of people is a valuable and critical skill needed to succeed in any academic or professional discipline,” said Jeff Pobst, GSS co-president and a doctoral candidate in physics in Arts & Sciences.
He and GSS co-president Shankar Parajuli said the symposium also creates a unique forum for dialogue among students and faculty from across the university by encouraging discussion, networking, and interdisciplinary collaboration and communication about ongoing research.
Monetary prizes were awarded to the top three presenters in each of five categories — humanities, sciences, social sciences, engineering and professional programs. For a list of the winning research projects, visit here.
Richard J. Smith, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Parajuli and Pobst were among those speaking during the awards ceremony that followed the two-hour poster presentations.
Mark Conradi, PhD, a physics professor and a WUSTL alumnus, was the guest speaker.
GSS partnered with WUSTL's Speaking Studio, a service of The Writing Center, to offer workshops in preparation for the symposium.
Held Jan. 23 in the Liberman Graduate Center, the workshops focused on writing an abstract, presenting one’s research to a broad academic audience and creating a compelling research poster.
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All three event co-sponsors are celebrating their 20th anniversaries this academic year. GSS commemorated its milestone by debuting a new GSS logo at the symposium after holding a university-wide logo contest.
Chen Po-Jung, a graduate student studying architecture and urban design, won for his logo design.
Parajuli and Pobst said the research symposium has become a model for similar events at colleges and universities across the country.
"Events such as this become particularly important as we enter a new world of data and expertise sharing between what we traditionally called ‘different backgrounds,’” said Parajuli, a doctoral candidate in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences at the Medical Campus working in cell biology and biochemistry.
“As we are discovering, one cannot get a complete grasp of the world by only being an expert in one field. One field's expertise needs that of the other.”
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stood before Washington University in St. Louis’ McDonnell scholars earlier this month and told them the truth – the world’s leaders have failed to stop civil war, poverty or the ravages of climate change.
But, he continued, one day they might.
“Mr. Ban Ki-moon told us, ‘This is what we need to do better,’” said Kuan-Yu (“Mike”) Shen, who is earning his PhD in energy and environmental chemical engineering. “A lot of politicians will speak in a polite way but won’t come out and address the issues, but he showed us you can be direct and diplomatic.”
This is the third time Ban has spoken to members of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy during their spring break trip to New York. Scholars also met this year with Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Michael Slackman, deputy foreign editor of The New York Times, as well as other leaders in media, politics and finance.
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“Part of the job of the academy is to expose future global leaders to U.S. institutions and their leaders,” said James V. Wertsch, PhD, McDonnell International Scholars Academy director, vice chancellor for international affairs and the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences. “The scholars do us proud. They ask a lot of very good, very tough questions.”
The academy serves PhD and master’s students from 28 partner universities across the globe and from the U.S. Scholars represent nearly every discipline and come from all corners of the world, from Taiwan to Ghana to Australia.
Sarita Barton is one of the program’s three U.S. scholars. She was excited to be among the first visitors to the National September 11 Museum, which has yet to open to the public. Joe Daniels, a WUSTL alumnus and president and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation, led the hard-hat tour.
“A lot of times during the trip, we were so stimulated by the meeting we just had we would keep the conversations going on the bus,” Barton said. “It was very interesting to be the American and to see things, like the museum, from a more global perspective.”
Some of those conversations were hard, Shen acknowledged.
“We speak differently and grew up differently and all experienced this big, sad news and its aftermath differently,” Shen said. “It’s not easy to share your thoughts with others that might disagree with you. But that’s just good practice for the future. Because if we can’t have these discussions with each other, then who can we have them with?”
That’s why Wertsch calls the academy “a safe place for unsafe discussions.”
“You need to know and understand each other to have the tough conversations,” Wertsch said. “And one of the best way to get to know someone is to travel with them.”
Emily Baker and Antonio Rodriguez star in “The Awakening,” based on the book by St. Louis author Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Perhaps the most controversial novel of its day, “The Awakening” is now considered a landmark of feminist literature.
“The Awakening" by Kate Chopin is adapted for the stage by Henry I. Schvey and presented by St. Louis Actors' Studio at the Missouri History Museum March 13-23. This is a story about a wife and mother in late 19th-century New Orleans who dares to challenge the mores imposed upon her by society. The journey of self-discovery that follows makes us question whether her actions are liberating or merely selfish.
— Cindy Kahn, assistant to the chair, Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences
Event Details:
Who: The St. Louis Actors' Studio
What: Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” adapted to the stage by Henry I. Schvey
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, March 20, 21 and 22; 2 p.m. Sunday, March 23
Where: Des Lee Auditorium, Missouri History Museum, Forest Park
(From left) WUSTL sophomores Daniel Feinberg, Caitlin Lee and Madelyn Welsh will attend this year's Clinton Global Initiative University.
During a trip to South Africa, sophomore Daniel Feinberg saw two cellphones resting in a hollowed-out detergent container and had a revelation.
“Many families have almost nothing, but they do have cellphones,” Feinberg said. “In a lot of places across the globe, the cellphone is a lifeline.”
Especially after a natural disaster. To help family members connect after a typhoon or tornado, Feinberg has developed “Stay in Touch,” a texting service that enables disaster victims and their families anywhere in the world to communicate using any mobile phone.
“After Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, my brother and I were thinking, ‘There has to be a better way,’” said Feinberg, a biology student. “It’s almost impossible to keep in touch with the current technologies. Almost all systems require the Internet, but the Internet is not accessible in a lot of areas.”
Feinberg and team members Caitlin Lee, a sophomore studying global health and health-care management, and Madelyn Welsh, also a sophomore, studying international and area studies, are among the 29 Washington University in St. Louis students invited to present their "commitment to action" ideas at the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) March 21-23 at Arizona State University. WUSTL hosted CGI U last year. Scheduled 2014 participants include Sen. John McCain, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
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CGI U organizers selected "Stay in Touch" as one of 32 student teams to compete in its 2014 Commitments Challenge, which is modeled after the NCAA basketball tournament. The teams that raise the most money move on to the next round.
"Stay in Touch" raised $2,845 from the public and advanced to the Final Four. Supporters can donate to the effort here.
A service 'all of us could need'
Win or lose, Feinberg, Lee and Welsh plan to push ahead with the idea, which also could serve families torn apart by civil war or other conflicts.
“Unfortunately, this is the sort of service all of us could need at some point,” said Lee, who traveled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “Even here, there is an issue with emergency preparedness.”
"Stay in Touch" users would register in advance and create a directory of close family members and friends. Then, in an emergency, they could leave a message for anybody who is searching for them.
“That message could be a phone number or a location or simply a message that says, ‘I’m OK,’” Feinberg explained. “But what makes this unique is that it can be done from any phone because all you are doing is texting into our service.”
Founded by the Clinton Global Initiative, an initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, CGI U supports projects that advance CGI U's five focus areas: education, environmental sustainability, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.
The Gephardt Institute for Public Service is the WUSTL representative of CGI U, and maintains the university’s status as part of the CGI U network by providing funding and training opportunities to CGI U participants.
Other WUSTL commitments to action include:
* Magic Food Bus: Sophomore John Wang, studying anthropology, proposes bringing a healthy food truck to St. Louis’ food deserts.
* The Social Kitchen: Junior Mackenzie Findlay, studying international affairs, wants to open a social business café in Seattle that would provide micro credit loans around the world.
* Project VES: Junior Sourik Beltran, studying anthropology, plans to expand an eyeglass clinic in Villa El Salvador, Peru.
* STEMs for Youth: Freshmen Nikki Metzger, studying bioscience, Allen Osgood, studying computer science, and Nate Vogt, studying engineering, plan to expand STEMs for Youth, which introduces STEM education through fun after-school programs.
Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said he’s thrilled the "Stay in Touch" team and other students are building on the momentum from last year’s event at WUSTL.
“'Stay in Touch’ is a simple idea that could change the way that the world’s relief organizations carry out their work and bring hope to those affected by disasters around the globe,” Wrighton said.
“So many of our students want to make an impact on the world,” he said, “and the excitement of last year’s CGI U on campus was an inspiration for many of them. Large events like these – coupled with our own ongoing efforts to enact change through the Gephardt Institute for Public Service and outreach programs and research in all of our schools and colleges – are springboards that enable our students to turn their ideas into impactful, sustainable projects.”
Feinberg was among the many WUSTL students who attended CGI U events on campus last year. Comedian Stephen Colbert, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Sen. Claire McCaskill all appeared, but it was Bill Clinton’s speech that motivated Feinberg to act.
“After I heard Bill Clinton, I knew that I wanted to be part of CGI U,” Feinberg said. “It may sound cliche, but seeing that huge room filled with people wanting to change the world really inspired me.”
World-renowned archaeologist John M. Camp, PhD, will give this year’s John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series. His lecture, “Greece Between Antiquity and Modernity: View of Two Early 19th Century Travelers” will be at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium on Washington University in St. Louis' Danforth Campus. It is free and open to the public.
Arguably one of the leading authorities in Athenian and classical archaeology, Camp has worked on the longest-running excavation in Greece, the Athenian Agora, for more than four decades. In 1966, he joined the team as an excavator, then became assistant director, and he has been its director since 1994. He has published two volumes, “The Archaeology of Athens” and “The Athenian Agora.”
As stated on the American School of Classical Studies at Athens website, the Agora was the center of public life in ancient Athens, a large, open square geographically located at its center that served a wide variety of social, cultural, political, commercial and religious purposes. There, one would shop for pottery and jewelry or watch performances, processions and competitions.
The square was also the seat of the Athenian government, and there were shrines and temples for worship. Its walkways provided a gathering place to discuss business or philosophy, and its statues held inscriptions regarding past triumphs. It was where great statesmen, writers and philosophers such as Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle held sway. It is where the concept of democracy took root.
Camp is the Niarchos Professor of Classics at Randolph-Macon College and also teaches at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Among his areas of specialization are Greek epigraphy (the study of inscriptions) and water supply in ancient Athens.
He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and both his master’s and doctoral degrees in classical archaeology from Princeton University.
For information regarding future Assembly Series programs, visit here or call 314-935-4620.
Sarah Hadassah Negrón choreographs and performs “The Weeping Woman” as part of "Young Choreographers Showcase" April 4-6. All photos by David Marchant. Download hires image.
To be on stage is to be vulnerable — a situation compounded when one is both dancer and choreographer.
“There’s an emotional investment,” said senior Sarah Raker. “Allowing people to see who you are, how you move … It’s a powerful experience.”
On April 4, 5 and 6, Raker and Negrón will bring their works back to campus as part of the “Young Choreographers Showcase.”
The biennial concert, sponsored by the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences, will feature more than a dozen dancers in nine original works created by student choreographers in the PAD's Dance Program.
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Sarah Raker choreographs and performs her solo “What Do You Go Home To?” Download hires image.
Different every time
“’Young Choreographers Showcase’ presents the ‘final cut,’ the best works made this year by our undergraduate dance artists,” said David Marchant, professor of the practice in dance, who co-directs YCS with Raker.
“When you read the students' statements of their own work, you notice a lot of the same words,” Marchant said. “Struggle, stress, frustration, anger … But when you look at the works visually, when you see the movement and hear the music, the ways they choose to express those feelings are really quite distinct.
“It’s an interesting barometer of the life of a young person right now.”
Dances are selected by a jury that includes Marchant and Raker as well as the full-time dance faculty and music director Henry Claude. Virtually all other aspects of the show, both onstage and behind the scenes, are managed by the students themselves.
“The works are mostly modern, and we have a lot of solos this year,” Raker said. “A few pieces have similar themes. Lydia Jackson’s ‘(silence)’ and Moya Shpuntoff’s ‘Unavailable,’ for example, both use small, intricate gestures. But we also have a comedic, character-driven piece that pokes fun at student stress, and another that explores house music and club culture. It’s a surprisingly diverse show.”
Raker’s own contribution, “What Do You Go Home To?” is a structured improvisation set to instrumental music by the Texas band Explosions in the Sky.
“The solo is different every time,” Raker said. “But there’s an arc to the music I try to reflect, and certain movements and motifs that I try to develop.
“I’m graduating in May,” she added with a smile, “so I’m interested in themes of nostalgia and belonging.”
“Said One to the Other” Junior Daniela Diego choreographs this piece about two friends telling a story to the audience.
“Marginalized” “This piece reflects the various emotions that may be experienced by people who feel marginalized,” said junior choreographer Maya Kyles, “feelings of frustration, fear, and anger and the process of letting go of these negative emotions and learning to embrace who you are.”
“can you feel it” Senior Briana Pickens offers this “commemoration of evolved house music.”
“Unavailable” “The dance explores feelings of isolation, exhaustion, anger, numbness, and despair that come throughout the repetitive and disappointing process of just trying to be OK,” said sophomore Moya Shpuntoff.
“Rhapsody at WU” “This dance pokes fun at the life of a Wash U student, how students think they have to be constantly stressed out,” said junior Samantha Gaitsch. “Moral of the story: It’s OK to be happy!”
“(silence)” Senior Lydia Jackson said, “This gestural dance is about the frustration and anger that can come from daily interactions with strangers and friends and the struggle to be understood.”
“The Weeping Woman” “This dance captures the various emotions (struggles, pain, etc.) associated with being a woman,” said senior Sarah Hadassah Negrón, “as well as the strength needed to endure such emotions.”
“The Music Box” Junior Deborah Li describes “The Music Box” as “a short story about a doll who is trapped in a spinning ring by the man who owns her box.”
Tickets
“Young Choreographers Showcase” begins at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 4 and 5; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 6.
Performances take place in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio, located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd.
Tickets are $15 — or $10 for students, seniors and WUSTL faculty and staff — and are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office. For more information, call 314-935-6543.
The Eliot Trio will perform works by Martinů, Beethoven and Dvořák at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, in Holmes Lounge. From left to right: Seth Carlin, professor of music; David Halen, concertmaster for the St. Louis Symphony, and Bjorn Ranheim, also with the St. Louis Symphony.
In 1795, Ludwig van Beethoven debuted one of his earliest compositions, a set of three piano trios, at the home of Prince Karl von Lichnowsky in Vienna. Among the guests was Franz Joseph Haydn, Beethoven’s occasional mentor and himself a pioneer of the form.
Yet Beethoven, never lacking for confidence, departed from Haydn’s example in two important ways. While piano tended to dominate Haydn’s trios, Beethoven demanded equal contributions from cello and violin. And while Haydn typically employed three movements, Beethoven opted for four.
Afterwards, Beethoven asked his teacher for feedback. Exhausted by a recent trip to London, the 63-year-old Haydn suggested a little more work might be necessary before publication.
Today, of course, Beethoven’s trios are regarded as masterworks. At 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, Washington University’s Eliot Trio will perform the very first of them—the Piano Trio No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 1—as part of its annual concert in Holmes Lounge.
Martinů, Beethoven and Dvořák
Named for WUSTL founder William Greenleaf Eliot, the Eliot Trio consists of Seth Carlin, professor of music in Arts & Sciences and director of the piano program; violinist David Halen, concertmaster for the St. Louis Symphony; and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, also with the St. Louis Symphony.
The program will open with Piano Trio No. 2 in D minor, H. 327, by Bohuslav Martinů. A prolific composer, Martinů was born in Polička, Czechoslovakia, and spent much of the 1920s and 30s in Paris, where he was deeply influenced by jazz and the neo-classicism of Igor Stravinsky.
But in 1941, as Hitler’s army advanced, Martinů fled for the United States, where he remained in exile until 1953. The D minor trio, composed in 1951, represents both the difficulties and triumphs of that period. Written in a matter of weeks, the piece opens in tender, contemplative mood that builds, over the course of its four movements, to a dynamic, tour-de-force finale.
Next on the program will be Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 1. Concluding the evening will be Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90, "Dumky".
Taking its name from the traditional dumka—a type of Slavic (some say Ukrainian) folk song—the Dumky trio boasts a highly unusual six-part structure, alternating slow, elegiac sections with bright, energetic passages. The result is both one of Dvořák’s best-known works and a dramatic challenge to the familiar three- and four-movement sonata.
Tickets
Tickets are $25, or $15 for seniors and Washington University faculty and staff, and $5 for students. Tickets are available through the Edison Theater Box Office, (314) 935-6543, or at edison.wustl.edu.
Holmes Lounge is located in Ridgley Hall, on the far side of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives.
For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.
Graduate student David Korasick commuted between the Strader Lab, which specializes in genetics, and the Jez Lab, which has expertise in structural biology, to learn how plants control the effects of the master hormone auxin.
Wikipedia lists 65 adjectives that botanists use to describe the shapes of plant leaves. In English (rather than Latin) they mean the leaf is lance-shaped, spear-shaped, kidney-shaped, diamond shaped, arrow-head-shaped, egg-shaped, circular, spoon-shaped , heart-shaped, tear-drop-shaped or sickle-shaped — among other possibilities.
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The ornate leaves of a humble sprig of cilantro are produced by the action of the plant hormone auxin.
How does the plant “know” how to make these shapes? The answer is by controlling the distribution of a plant hormone called auxin, which determines the rate at which plant cells divide and lengthen.
But how can one molecule make so many different patterns? Because the hormone’s effects are mediated by the interplay between large families of proteins that either step on the gas or put on the brake when auxin is around.
In recent years as more and more of these proteins were discovered, the auxin signaling machinery began to seem baroque to the point of being unintelligible.
Now the Strader and Jez labs at Washington University in St. Louis have made a discovery about one of the proteins in the auxin signaling network that may prove key to understanding the entire network.
In the March 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they explain that they were able to crystallize a key protein called a transcription factor and work out its structure. The interaction domain of the protein, they learned, folds into a flat paddle with a positively charged face and a negatively charged face. These faces allow the proteins to snap together like magnets, forming long chains, or oligomers.
We have some evidence that proteins chain in plant cells as well as in solution, said senior author Lucia Strader, PhD, assistant professor of biology and an auxin expert. By varying the length of these chains, plants may fine-tune the response of individual cells to auxin to produce detailed patterns such as the toothed lobes of the cilantro leaf.
Combinatorial explosion Sculpting leaves is just one of many roles auxin plays in plants. Among other things the hormone helps make plants bend toward the light, roots grow down and shoots grow up, fruits develop and fruits fall off.
“The most potent form of the hormone is indole-3-acetic acid, abbreviated IAA, and my lab members joke that IAA really stands for Involved in Almost Everything,” Strader said.
The backstory here is that whole families of proteins intervene between auxin and genes that respond to auxin by making proteins. In the model plant Aribidopsis thaliana these include 5 transcription factors that activate genes when auxin is present (called ARFs) and 29 repressor proteins that block the transcription factors by binding to them (Aux/IAA proteins). A third family marks repressors for destruction.
“Different combinations of these proteins are present in each cell,” said Strader. “On top of that, some combinations interact more strongly than others and some of the transcription factors also interact with one another."
In an idle moment David Korasick, a graduate fellow in the Strader and Jez labs and first author on the PNAS article, did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to put a number on the complexity of the system they were trying to understand. From a strictly mathematical point of view there are 3,828 possible combinations of the auxin-related Arabidopsis proteins. That is assuming interactions involve only one of each type of protein; if multiples are possible, the number, of course, explodes.
To make any headway, Strader said, we had a better understanding of how these proteins interact. The rule in protein chemistry is the opposite of the one in design: instead of form following function, function follows form.
So to figure out a protein’s form — the way it folds in space — they turned to the Jez lab, which specializes in protein crystallography, essentially a form of high-resolution microscopy that allows protein structures to be visualized at the atomic level.
Korasick had the job of crystallizing ARF7, a transcription factor that helps, Arabidopsis bend toward the light. With the help of Joseph Jez, PhD, associate professor of biology, Corey Westfall, and Soon Goo Lee), Korasick cut “floppy bits” off the protein that might have made it hard to crystallize, leaving just the part of the protein where it interacts with repressor molecules.
After he had that construct, crystallization was remarkably fast. He set up his first drops in solution wells on the 4th of July. The protein crystallized with a fuss, and he ran the crystals up to the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago. By August 1 he had the diffraction data he needed to solve the protein’s structure.
Surprise, surprise The previous model for the interaction between a repressor and a transcription factor – a model that had stood for 15 years, Strader said-- was that the repressor lay flat on the transcription factor, two domains on the repressor matching up with the corresponding two domains on the transcription factor.
The structural model Korasick developed showed that the two domains fold together to form a single domain, called a PB1 domain. A PB1 domain is a protein interaction module that can be found in animals and fungi as well as plants.
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Strader, Jez et al.
The transcription factor ARF7 turned out to have a magnet-like interaction region, called a PB1 domain ,with positively (blue) and negatively (red) charged faces.
The repressor proteins, which are predicted to have PB1 domains identical to that of the ARF transcription factor, then stick to one or the other side of the transcription factor’s PB1 domain, preventing it from doing its job. Experiments showed that there had to be a repressor protein stuck to both faces of the transcription factor’s PB1 domain to repress the activity of auxin.
This means the model, which pairs a single repressor protein with a single transcription factor, is wrong, Strader said.
“Nor can we limit the interactions to just two,” she said. “It could be hundreds for all we know.“
In Korasick’s crystal five of the ARF7 PB1 domains stuck to one another, forming a pentamer.
“I like to think of the PB1 domains as magnets, “ Strader said. “Like magnets, they can stick together, back-to-front, to form long chains.”
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Strader, Jez et al.
The double-sided interaction domain may allow multi-protein chains to form. In Korasick’s crystal, five of the ARF7 PB1 domains stuck to one another, forming a pentamer. “It was really beautiful to look at in the software, because you could actually see its spirals and turns,” said Korasick.
“But we have to put an asterisk next to that,” Korasick said, “because it’s possible it’s an artifact of crystallography and doesn’t work that way in living plants.“
But both Strader and Korasick suspect that it does. Strader points out that the complexity of the auxin signaling system has increased over evolutionary time as plants became fancier. A simple plant like the moss Physcomitrella patens has fewer signaling proteins than a complicated plant like soybean.
“Probably what that’s saying is that it’s really, really important for a plant to be able to modulate auxin signaling, to have the right amount in each cell, to balance positive and negative growth,” Korasick said.
“The difference between plants and animals,” said Strader, “is that plants have rigid cell walls. So when a plant cell decides to divide itself or length itself, that’s a permanent decision, which is why it’s so tightly controlled.“