The Women’s Society of Washington University announced the winners of the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarships during the group’s annual membership meeting April 10 at the 560 Music Center.
The Switzer Leadership Award is presented to outstanding graduating seniors who have made significant contributions to the Washington University in St. Louis community during their time as students and have exceptional potential for future leadership. This year’s recipients were Jasmine Brown and Divya Walia, both students in Arts & Sciences.
The Women’s Society of Washington University gave out the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Awards during the group’s annual membership meeting in April. One of the winners is Jasmine Brown, who is graduating from Arts & Sciences this month. (Photo: Mary Butkus/Washington University)
Brown, who is majoring in biology, is passionate about addressing achievement disparities in science, technology, engineering and math fields among minority students. Brown won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, and after graduation, she plans to pursue a PhD in neuroscience at Oxford University.
While at Washington University, she started the Minority Association of Rising Scientists, a forum where minority students can talk about their research and their interest in science. She has conducted research at institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins and University of Miami.
One of the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award winners, Divya Walia (left), who is graduating from Arts & Sciences this month, chats with Kathy Frost, incoming president of the Women’s Society. (Photo: Mary Butkus/Washington University)
Walia is majoring in economics and in international and area studies, with a minor in finance. She has served as a peer counselor with Uncle Joe’s since her freshman year. She also worked as a virtual foreign service intern with the U.S. State Department’s Libyan Embassy, managing a Facebook group of 4,000 participants to promote English language literacy and an understanding of the U.S. culture among Libyans. Following graduation, she plans to work as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
The Women’s Society also presented the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship, which awards full-tuition scholarships to outstanding community-college transfer students. This year’s awardees were Madison Bouse and Willow Rosen.
Scholarship winners Madison Bouse (left) and Willow Rosen visit with society member Nancy Hawes. (Photo: Mary Butkus/Washington University)
Bouse studied at the Meramec campus of St. Louis Community College, where she excelled in her studies of history and language. She grew up exploring new environments with her family, from U.S. national parks to eighth-century Buddhist temples in Korea. Additionally, Bouse worked as an intern with Liberty in North Korea, a nonprofit that rescues and resettles North Korean refugees.
Rosen was part of the Forest Park campus’ honors program, in which she conducted research and presented a project focused on reproductive rights as an aspect of the black freedom struggle. She has studied midwifery for 10 years and is a licensed labor doula and childbirth educator. Rosen brings passion for social causes. For example, she was instrumental in reviving VOICES at St. Louis Community College, a student club dedicated to the concerns of the LGBTQ community. She plans on studying women, gender and sexuality studies and the medical humanities, in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University.
Anthropology students Ed Henry and Elissa Bullion (right) celebrate the receipt of a departmental service award named for former anthropology administrator Kathleen Clark (center).
The Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has recognized doctoral students Elissa Bullion and Ed Henry with its annual H. Kathleen Cook Award for excellence in scholarship, dedication to teaching and commitment to building and sustaining the graduate student community.
Given to doctoral students who “work tirelessly in their academics, consistently provide support to others in the department and find ways to enrich the anthropological community,” the award is named for a now-retired departmental administrator who exemplified these traits.
Recipients receive a $200 award and have their name engraved on a plaque that hangs outside the Graduate Student Lounge in McMillan Hall.
Gerry Rohde, stockroom manager and laboratory safety officer in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has died. He was 55.
Rohde had worked at the university since 1993. He first worked in the stockroom in the Department of Chemistry, then transferred to the biology department in 1997. He wrote a safety spotlight for the biology newsletter and served as the department liaison with the university’s Environmental Health & Safety department.
“Gerry was a unique individual who touched everyone’s lives in the department,” said Kathryn Miller, professor and chair of biology. “In his role, he helped to make sure that everyone had what they needed to do their research. He oversaw the flow of purchase orders, receiving, and stockroom supplies for 33 faculty members and their laboratory groups. The job suited him very well, and he always had a joke or a smile when you visited the stockroom.”
“Gerry was a visible and vibrant presence, and he will be sorely missed,” she said.
Rohde also was known around campus and across the area as the evening host of St. Louis Public Radio, KWMU FM 90.7, where he had worked in various on-air capacities since 1985. For more than 20 years, Rohde had managed programming weeknights from 7-11 p.m.
Rohde was raised in Bremen, Germany, and first came to the United States as a high school exchange student in 1978. He returned in 1983 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in German and in mathematics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and he had lived in St. Louis since then.
Rohde is survived by his sister, Geena Eaton of Overland, Mo.
Learn more about Rohde in his Washington People profile, published in April.
Megan Wolf hadn’t even started classes in August of 2014 whenSharon Stahl, then vice chancellor for students, spoke at a preseason meeting of the women’s soccer team, encouraging the new players to get involved in campus activities. Wolf recalled Stahl specifically asking for volunteers for a university committee on sexual violence.
“I didn’t really know a whole lot of people here, and I was considering it,” said Wolf, who will earn a degree in mathematics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis this month, along with minors in economics and in psychology and brain sciences. “One of our seniors was involved, and said, ‘If you don’t yet know what you want to do beyond soccer, you should do this. This could really make a change on campus.’ ”
So Wolf signed up, and she continued to remain involved into the next year when, per the recommendation of the committee, a student peer-education group formed. The group became known as Leaders in Interpersonal Violence Education (LIVE), whose mission is peer-led education of students surrounding topics of interpersonal violence, violence prevention, consent and healthy relationships. Wolf was there at the beginning of the organization, and she held various leadership roles in her four years during some trying times, including co-president in the spring of her junior year.
“At the time the group was formed, very few people talked about sexual violence on campus,” she said. “We’ve made some positive steps in the right direction.”
Wolf said her leadership in LIVE taught her not only how to lead, but also how to ask for help and ask tough questions, especially when she didn’t know the answers herself. “Finding that balance not only made me a better leader, but it made the group better,” Wolf said. “I don’t know everything that’s going on, but if I need to lead a group toward a goal, I’m not afraid to ask outside the group — to find someone within who knows more than I do.
“LIVE was an amazing experience, and I’m so happy it was part of my Washington University story,” she said. “Because it’s the one thing — more than anything I’ve done — that has given me perspective.”
And there’s a lot to Wolf’s Washington University story. If there’s a theme for this math major, it’s knowing how to play the angles, understanding where the lines are drawn and learning how to use the system in place to effect change — all aiming toward the goal of leaving the university a better place than it was when she got here.
In addition to helping get LIVE off the ground, Wolf stayed the course studying mathematics when she easily could have switched majors. She served as student representative to the Board of Trustees as well as on search committees for the new chancellor (although her service ends with graduation) and the hiring of a new athletics director (who would come to be Anthony Azama). She also played four years on the women’s soccer team, scoring arguably the greatest goal in women’s soccer history.
“I hope I’m leaving WashU a better place,” she said. “Because it has had such a huge impact on me. I’m leaving here a much better person than I ever expected to be.”
Wolf (left) says she remembers little about actually shooting the championship-winning penalty kick, because she had practiced the shot so many times. But she remembers the celebration that ensued Dec. 3, 2016, when Washington University won its first-ever national soccer title. (Photo: Roger Mastroianni)
Playing the angle
Matriculating at Washington University came ever so close to not happening at all for Wolf. She was a promising prep soccer player from Racine, Wis., but could never get on the radar of Coach Jim Conlon, who understandably gets hundreds of inquiries each year. She liked the university for its academics — “My parents would never have let me choose a school just for soccer,” she said — so she signed up to attend a summer camp following her junior year.
The camp was back-to-back with another one at the University of Rochester. “I flew from Wisconsin to Rochester, from Rochester to St. Louis,” she said. “And my mom drove 5 1/2 hours with a bag of clean clothes to pick me up at the airport and drive me to campus.”
Wolf wanted to skip the camp and head back home, but her mom refused. “I told her, ‘This is a waste of time and money. Rochester was good enough and I can see myself there. Let’s just drive home.’
“My mom said, ‘Megan, I didn’t just drive 5 1/2 hours to have you tell me that this is not worth it. You are going! Go and make that coach wish he had recruited you harder. If you’re set on Rochester, make him wish that he had done it first.’ ”
So Wolf went to camp, and by the time she got back to Wisconsin, there was an email from Conlon saying, “We saw you at camp and want you to become a Bear.”
For you math majors, that’s the beginning point of a straight line to the women’s soccer program’s most heralded moment: The penalty-kick victory over Messiah College on Dec. 3, 2016, in Salem, Va., that gave the Bears their first Division III national soccer title.
Wolf scored the championship-winning goal, shooting a rocket in the lower right corner past the Messiah goaltender at an angle she had practiced, practiced and practiced. “Coach always told us, ‘Practice exactly how you would take it in the game,’ ” she said. “So I never looked up. I knew exactly where I was going so I didn’t need to look.
“And then I don’t remember anything until I turned around and saw my entire team running at me. I remember thinking, ‘OH. MY. GOD. What just happened?’ It’s a moment every single athlete dreams of.”
Conlon called Wolf the “perfect Bear,” whose enthusiasm is contagious. “When recruiting, we look for strong students, good athletes who have high character and build on the potential we see,” he said. “Megan was all three. She is truly a scholar-champion.”
Inside the lines
So if peer leadership in a groundbreaking campus group and a legendary goal weren’t enough, Wolf’s college years also will be measured through her experience as a student representative to the university administration.
“It was cool being able to put on so many hats,” she said. “I’d be hanging out with my friends until midnight, and then have to wake up at 6:15 a.m., to put on my business suit for a Board of Trustees meeting and head right into talking about the financials of the university.
“I learned so much about the students, faculty and people that make up this place,” she said. “I wish more students could be able to experience that.”
And don’t forget, she was here to be a student and earn a degree, too. Wolf said she’d often walk into her math classes and be among a handful of women in a classroom of 50 or so. “A lot of people would ask me, ‘Why don’t you change majors?’ and I was always like, ‘No way!’
“I may not use what I learned in math classes specifically,” she said, “but I’ll use what my math major gave me, which is being able to problem solve, figure out tough situations, work with people that I might never have the opportunity to otherwise, and navigate at any place that could potentially not be as welcoming as I had hoped.”
Wolf’s post-graduation plans include a job in New York with Mastercard Inc. as an associate analyst in enterprise data solutions for the company. And when she’s walking into Brookings Quadrangle on Commencement Day, she’ll have mixed emotions.
“It will be a mix of excitement and a lot of pride, but some sadness,” she said. “This has been my home for the past four years and is where I’ve met some of my best friends, so the thought of leaving all of that is kind of scary. It’s the first time I don’t know what I’m going to be doing for an extended period of time.
“As soon as I see my mom and dad, I’ll probably start sobbing,” she said. “But I’m just going to go and enjoy whatever life throws at me, which will be awesome. And I can always call or visit my friends.”
Nowadays Sarah C.R. “Sally” Elgin would probably be referred to as gifted or talented. But in the 1950s, a really smart girl was obnoxious or a nerd.
“I come from a long line of nerds, and it’s not always a good social position to be in,” explained Elgin, the Viktor Hamburger Professor of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and founder of the forerunner to the university’s Institute for School Partnership.
Elgin, who plans to retire at the end of the academic year, paused to reflect on the lessons she has learned during her life in science.
“I have seen so many changes in my 40-plus years — not just advances in biology but advances in science education and higher education efforts to recruit scientists from all backgrounds,” Elgin said.
Growing up in Salem, Ore., Elgin knew early on that she wanted to be a scientist. In fourth grade, she started a zoo that featured insects in jars. But there wasn’t much science curriculum in her grade school. There were no lab facilities. Any curriculum was very much textbook-driven. In junior high, science was an elective. Her mother wanted her to take orchestra instead.
“She was very much into music,” Elgin said. “And there was only the one elective. My mom talked with the science teacher, and he said, ‘Well, we don’t do very much, so let her read the textbook. I ended up taking orchestra.”
But in 1957, the launch of Soviet Union satellite Sputnik changed her life and science education in the United States. Alarmed that American students were falling behind, the government tripled funding for the National Science Foundation to improve science education. Federal money flowed into schools for curriculum reform, teacher workshops and more. Elgin also benefited from having great high school teachers — teachers that encouraged her interest in science.
Elgin went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., in 1967. She earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972. Elgin eventually joined the Department of Biology at Washington University in 1981 and became a full professor in 1984.
In the late 1980s, she founded the Office of Science Outreach, which initially started as an informal science education partnership with her children’s school district in University City. It brought university science faculty into schools to provide students with interactive environmental science and genetics projects. That effort evolved into its present-day form, the Institute for School Partnership, led by Victoria L. May.
Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recognized eight outstanding alumni and supporters of the school during its 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards dinner, held April 25 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis.
Martin Israel, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and a member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, received the Dean’s Medal. Israel and seven alumni were recognized for their achievements, service and commitment to the liberal arts.
There is medical term for the condition that Zach Linneman has observed in Malawi, Sierra Leone and India — severe acute malnutrition, or SAM.
Linneman uses a different word: starvation.
“That’s what it is, plain and simple,” Linneman said. “Whatever you call it, it is a huge emergency we must address.”
UNICEF estimates that some 16 million children under the age of five suffer from severe acute malnutrition, the largest contributor to child mortality in the world. Victims experience bloating, low appetite and are vulnerable to infection.
To prepare for a career treating and studying global malnutrition, Linneman has completed the post-baccalaureate premedical program in University College in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. For a decade now, he has helped physicians and health organizations in Africa and India save lives and develop long-term solutions. He will continue that work during a gap year in India, then plans to attend medical school.
“The mentors and role models in my life are doctors and researchers,” Linneman said. “I saw through them that medicine is an effective and intimate way to feed the hungry and help the sick.”
Linneman first traveled to Malawi in 2006 as a rising senior at St. Louis University High School. The father of one of his best friends was Mark Manary, professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and founder of Project Peanut Butter, which has established feeding centers and successful nutrition programs in Malawi and Sierra Leone. Immediately upon returning home, Linneman asked Manary if he could return.
“He said, ‘Call me in a month,’” Linneman said. “I made a note on my calendar and called him precisely 30 days later. I knew then I wanted to make this my life’s work.”
Linneman returned to Malawi for another summer and then worked two more summers Sierra Leone while an undergraduate at Washington University. The program was an incredible success: some 92 percent of participants recovered — a credit to both Manary and the local Malawians who produced and packaged the therapeutic food, recruited and educated mothers.
“My Malawian boss, a guy named Liyaka, was the son of a tribal chieftain who went to English speaking schools and had a Dutch wife,” Linneman said. “He showed me how to do business. We drove around all summer in a pick-up truck, buying food ingredients, machine parts for the factor and meeting contact. And we spent a lot of time with local officials to address practical in-country concerns. I walked away from these experiences appreciating that effective organizations are well integrated with talented leaders from the local community.”
During the academic year, Linneman was studying Chinese in the Department of Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences. He graduated in 2011 knowing that, in all likelihood, he would apply to a post-baccalaureate program to prepare for medical school. He knew University College offered a program, but until he was enrolled didn’t realize it was one of the nation’s best, drawing top candidates from across the globe.
“The University College experience was just as outstanding as my undergraduate experience,” said Linneman, who considers University College organic chemistry instructor Rhiannon Iha among the top educators he has ever met. “This program gets purpose-driven people into medical school. I feel prepared to continue my education and do what I really care about — helping those who need it most.”
Nikolai Lugansky is a virtuoso pianist who plays with “plush sound and plenty of impetuosity” (New York Times). Tamara Mumford, the charismatic mezzo-soprano, “has an aristocratic middle range, dusky depths and great confidence” (New York Times).
Violinist Gil Shaham is renowned for his “silvery tone, spot-on intonation and meticulously molded phrasing” (Washington Post). Katia and Marielle Labèque are “the best piano duet in front of an audience today” (New York Times).
For its 2018-19 Great Artists Series, Washington University in St. Louis will present four affordably priced concerts by some of today’s finest performers.
“Our third Great Artists Series promises more not-to-be-missed recitals,” said Todd Decker, chair of the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, which presents the series. “These are some of the most powerful performers of our time.”
Lugansky will open the series Feb. 10 with works by Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninov, followed by Mumford on March 21. On April 7, Shaham will be joined by pianist Akira Eguchi, his longtime collaborator, for music of Fritz Kreisler, Scott Wheeler, Avner Dorman, Johann Sebastian Bach and César Franck. The Labèque sisters will conclude the series May 5 with works by Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and Philip Glass.
“With a truly international lineup and four concerts at very affordable prices in the beautiful, historic and recently renewed Des Lee Concert Hall,” Decker added, “the music department hopes to further expand the enthusiastic audience for classical music on the Delmar Loop.”
Katia and Marielle Labèque (Photo: Umberto Nicoletti)
Tickets
Subscriptions to all four recitals are $120 and include premier reserved seating, post-concert receptions with the artists (when available), and all ticketing fees. Subscribers also will receive complimentary tickets to the March 2 performance by Third Coast Percussion, winners of the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music.
Single tickets are $35-40, or $32-37 for seniors and Washington University faculty and staff, and $15 for students and children.
Subscription renewals began April 22. New subscriptions went on sale May 7. Single ticket sales begin Aug. 27.
All four performances take place in the560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, 560 Trinity Ave. at the intersection with Delmar Boulevard. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, 314-935-6543, or at edison.wustl.edu.
A pianist of extraordinary depth and versatility, Lugansky was born in Moscow and memorized his first Beethoven sonata at age 5. Two years later, he enrolled at Moscow’s Central Music School and then studied at the Moscow Conservatoire.
Today, Lugansky works regularly with top conductors such as Osmo Vänskä, Yuri Temirkanov and Mikhail Pletnev. Recent concert highlights include engagements with the London and Baltimore symphony orchestras, the Hong Kong Philharmonic and European tours with the Russian National Orchestra and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo.
Lugansky appears frequently at many of the world’s most distinguished festivals, including La Roque d’Anthéron, the Verbier Festival, Tanglewood, Aspen and Ravinia. His numerous honors include being named a People’s Artist of Russia and both the Diapason d’Or and an ECHO Klassik Award for his recording of Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonatas. The Guardian (U.K.) described his most recent recording, of Tchaikovsky’s “Grande Sonata” and “The Seasons,” as “insightful and mature.”
Lugansky is artistic director of the Tambov Rachmaninov Festival as well as a supporter of, and regular performer at, the Rachmaninov Estate and Museum of Ivanovka.
Mumford
Mumford (Photo: Fay Fox)
A graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, Mumford has appeared in more than 150 productions with the company, including “Rigoletto,” “Nixon in China,” “The Magic Flute” and the complete Ring Cycle. In 2016, she was featured as Le Pélerin in a new production of Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” which was shown in movie theaters around the world as part of the Met’s Live in HD series.
An active concert performer, Mumford has appeared with the Boston, Oregon, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle symphonies, and with the Berlin, New York and Netherlands Radio philharmonics, among others. Recent highlights include title roles in “Dido and Aeneas” and “The Rape of Lucretia”; the world premiere of “Yardbird,” a chamber opera about jazz legend Charlie Parker; and the world premiere of John Adam’s oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” in U.S. and European tours with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Mumford’s numerous recordings include several Met Live productions, as well as the Grammy Award-nominated recording of Darius Milhaud’s “L’Orestie d’Eschyle” and Beethoven’s “Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II,” the latter with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.
Shaham, with Eguchi
Shaham (Photo: Luke Ratray)
Celebrated for his inimitable warmth and flawless technique, Shaham is one of the foremost violinists of our time. He appears regularly on many of the world’s great concert stages and with many of the world’s leading orchestras, include the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and San Francisco Symphony.
Shaham has released more than two dozen concerto and solo recordings, earning multiple Grammy Awards, a Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or and Gramophone Editor’s Choice. Many of these recordings appear on Canary Classics, the label he founded in 2004. His most recent recordings are the Grammy-nominated “1930s Violin Concertos Vol. 2” and “Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.”
Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and, in 2008, received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012, he was named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius.
Eguchi, Shaham’s longtime duo partner pianist, has performed at major venues around the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall to the Kennedy Center in Washington and Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. An active composer, he has been featured on 45 albums, including 11 solo recordings.
Katia and Marielle Labèque
Katia and Marielle Labèque. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)
Born in Bayonne, France, the Labèques rose to international fame with their two-piano rendition of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — one of the first gold records in classical music. Their extensive repertoire ranges from contemporary classical to jazz, minimal music and Baroque music performed on period instruments.
Renowned for their energy and synchronicity, the Labèques have performed with leading conductors across Europe and the United States, including Semyon Bychkov, Sir Colin Davis, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Leonard Slatkin; and worked with composers such as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen.
In 2015, the siblings joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the world premiere of Philip Glass’ “Double Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” which was written for them. Their 2016 performance with the Vienna Philharmonic drew a television audience of 1.5 million and was released on both CD and DVD.
The Labèques have released dozens of recordings, many for their own KML label. Their most recent recording, dedicated to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Debussy’s “Epigraphes Antiques,” was released by Deutsche Grammophon in November 2016.
Washington University Libraries has awarded the inaugural Newman Exploration Travel Fund (NEXT) scholarships and grants to seven members of the university community.
A donation from the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newman Foundation supports the program, for which more than 100 people applied. The winners and their travel destinations are:
Savannah Bustillo, undergraduate student in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts (Germany)
Kendall Carroll, undergraduate student in Arts & Sciences (Scotland)
Gabriela Hall, undergraduate student in the School of Engineering & Applied Science (Germany)
James Lucas, PhD candidate in Arts & Sciences (Nepal, Vietnam and Japan)
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, faculty in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics (Ghana and Portugal)
Thomas Malkowicz, staff in Public Affairs (Vietnam)
Anca Parvulescu, professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2018-19 academic year.
Parvulescu
The fellowship, awarded to Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, professor of sociology at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg in Germany, will support a research project titled “Comparatizing Transylvania: Rurality, Inter-Imperiality and the Global Modernist Market.” The award includes a stipend of up to $60,000 for each collaborator and up to $21,000 in project funds.
ACLS fellowships are among the nation’s most competitive, awarded to approximately 5 percent of applicants. The fellowships support scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.
Parvulescu’s research and teaching interests include 20th-century literature, modernity and modernism, literary and critical theory, narrative and the novel, and gender and feminist studies. She also holds appointments in the university’s Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities and in comparative literature, where she is director of graduate studies.
Peter Riesenberg, professor emeritus of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died in his sleep May 14, 2018, in Harpswell, Maine. He was 92.
Riesenberg, a beloved member of the faculty from 1960 until his retirement in 1993, was the mainstay of “History 101,” the history of Western civilization, for generations of students.
In his first book, “Inalienability of Sovereignty in Medieval Political Thought,” Riesenberg noticed repeated mentions of citizenship. This led to a long study of that institution, especially in a much-neglected but huge body of legal cases known as Consilia. These were legal questions put to Roman and canon lawyers for their judgment. The Consilia thus gives insight into the actual medieval duty, privilege and functions of citizens.
These studies resulted in “Citizenship in the Western Tradition,” a prize-winning work now translated into Mandarin. This book also developed from Riesenberg’s first published work, co-authored with John Mundy, “The Medieval Town.” And with Jack Hexter, Riesenberg contributed to a volume of readings and commentaries for classes in Western civilization.
Riesenberg was known as a legendary teacher in both large classes and seminars. At Washington University, he also was a figure in university governance, serving as the first secretary of the faculty; the first faculty member to sit with the Board of Trustees; and chair of the Faculty Senate Council.
He taught occasionally in the School of Law and with colleagues in physics and in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences.
Born in 1925 in New York, N.Y., Riesenberg entered Rutgers University in 1942. His education was interrupted by World War II, during which he served for two years in the U.S. Air Force. He graduated from Rutgers with a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
Riesenberg earned a master’s degree in history in 1949 from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1954. He studied in Rome on two Fulbright fellowships and a Cutting Fellowship from Columbia University.
He joined Washington University’s history department in 1960 after faculty positions at Swarthmore College and Rutgers.
Riesenberg is survived by his wife, Helen (Trudi), two daughters, Julia and Anne, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, as well as two stepsons and two step-grandchildren.
At Riesenberg’s request, there will be no funeral service. Riesenberg supported many charitable organizations, especially those benefiting the arts and equality. Donations are suggested in his name to a charity of one’s choice.
Each of them, despite being two thinking things, is one of us — one person.
It is an odd sentence to most, but not to Lizzie Schechter, assistant professor of philosophy and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis.
Schechter researches consciousness, the unities and disunities of mind, and personal identity. In her forthcoming book, she considers some of the most intriguing psychology patients to ever have submitted to research, subjects who have had the hemispheres of their brains — and perhaps their minds — severed in two.
Schechter
In her book “Self-Consciousness and ‘Split’ Brains: The Minds’ I,” which will be published June 1 by Oxford University Press, Schechter asks linguistically simple, but metaphysically puzzling questions: In a single body, how many minds are there? How many people?
In the second half of the 20th century, surgeons performed dozens of operations on people with severe epilepsy to ease the frequency and intensity of seizures. The surgery involved severing a significant part of the corpus callosum, a dense bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain, facilitating communication in and integration of the brain in a non-severed brain.
The surgeries were more or less successful, but experiments revealed unusual side effects.
“The two hemispheres begin to operate independently of each other,” Schechter said, “not totally, but to an unusual degree.”
For instance, each hand sends tactile information to the opposite hemisphere; touch something with your left hand, and the information is sent to your right hemisphere, and vice versa. If your corpus callosum is intact, no problem. The information travels through those nerves and is available to both your left and right hemispheres. But odd things happen when that connection is severed.
“Imagine blindfolding a split-brain patient so that they cannot see what you’re putting in their hands,” Schechter said. In their left hand they get a pipe. In the right, a pen. Then ask them what they are holding.
“They’ll say, ‘You gave me a pen in my right hand.’ But if you ask about their left hand, they’ll say, ‘I couldn’t feel it very well.’ Or, ‘My left hand is kind of numb.’” That’s because, Schechter said, in most people, the right hemisphere is “mute” and language is processed in the left hemisphere. Since tactile information is sent from one hand to the opposite hemisphere, the patient cannot voice any information received by the left hand.
“But if you now give the subject a pen and a piece of paper in their left hand and ask again, the person will be able to draw a picture of a pipe. They might even write the word, ‘pipe,’” Schechter said. “They just can’t speak it.
“It’s as though the subject suddenly had two centers, or streams of consciousness, controlling behavior; one associated with each hemisphere,” she said. “One of them can report by writing or drawing a picture that it felt a pipe. The other can report by writing, or drawing, or just speaking, that it felt a pen.
“But it’s as if no one felt both objects.”
In person, Schechter rapidly runs through a half-dozen experiments like this one — some even seem to involve the right hemisphere “cheating,” the left hand tracing an answer on the back of the right hand, for example.
Despite the oft-repeated claim by researchers that, outside of the lab, these subjects are “socially normal,” Schechter questions this claim in her book. A study conducted with six split-brain subjects found that they all struggled with significant and unusual behavioral problems outside of the lab: One hand interfering with the other as a subject tried to dress; subjects so paralyzed with indecision — or was it two minds wrestling with competing intentions? — that even making breakfast took hours.
So is there one mind or two? One person or two? Traditional explanations in philosophy tend to ascribe a 1-to-1 ratio of consciousness to personhood. But in “Self-Consciousness,” Schechter argues for what she calls a “reconciliation account.”
“The impression that a split-brain subject has two minds is correct,” she said. “But so is the impression that a split-brain subject is not just two human beings strapped together. They are one of us in an important, psychological sense: At the end of the day, they each think of themselves as ‘one’ of us, not two beings inhabiting the same body.”
They cannot help but to think this way, she said. They cannot live as two distinct psychological beings.
“If a split-brain subject were going to be distinct persons,” — that is, if each mind belonged to a distinct person — “that would mean that a split-brain subject were two of us. But the way two people can interact and think of themselves is just very different” than the way the two hemispheres can.
“It’s sort of like they are one of us,” Schechter said, “because they are not two of us.”
Philip Roth, who died May 22, was among the most influential American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He also was a playful yet unsparing and often provocative critic of American culture, said Matthew Shipe, senior lecturer in English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“From his debut collection ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ (1959) to his final novel ‘Nemesis’ (2010), Roth chronicled, in frequently ruthless and hilarious fashion, five decades of American life,” said Shipe, who also serves as president of the Philip Roth Society. “Perhaps more than any of his American contemporaries — John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion to name but a few — Roth captured the absurdities and the anxieties of our existence.
“Although Roth perhaps remains most famous (or infamous) for his 1969 novel ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ it is his later work that, for me, remains his most rewarding,” Shipe said. “Beginning with his 1995 novel ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ and continuing in subsequent books like ‘American Pastoral’ and ‘The Plot Against America,’ Roth turned to our recent past to interrogate the meaning of the changes that had transformed American culture during his lifetime.”
Alexander Barnes, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been recognized with a 2018 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, recognizing his independent scholarship and deep commitment to education.
Each Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar receives an unrestricted research grant of $75,000. Barnes will use the funding to improve a technology to detect the chemical agents that flush out HIV/AIDS DNA hiding inside living cells — genetic information which otherwise prevents a curative treatment. Research from the Barnes laboratory has greatly increased the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology that can be applied to structural studies within intact cells using a “pulsed” microwave approach and cryogenic cooling to a few degrees above absolute zero.
Barnes, who teaches undergraduate physical chemistry, freshman seminar and graduate-level magnetic resonance classes, among other courses, said that a key part of his teaching approach is to integrate his own cutting-edge research into the classroom to illustrate the application of basic concepts.
Do you waste time in the morning looking for your keys?
Try writing the word “KEYS” on a light switch you use every morning, and you might find them a little quicker.
That’s a suggestion based on brain-sciences memory research at Washington University in St. Louis showing that where someone looks can be guided by their recent interactions with the environment.
Our visual world is cluttered, complex and confusing. “We can’t fully process everything in a scene, so we have to pick and choose the parts of the scene we want to process more fully,” said Richard Abrams, professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences. “That is what we call ‘attention.’”
So then, how do we choose which parts of a scene deserve our attention?
“We’re more likely to direct our attention to things that match objects that we’ve interacted with,” Abrams said. The new research shows that this is the case even if they only match in meaning — not appearance, Abrams said.
Previous research has shown that our attention is biased toward objects that share basic features — such as color — with something we have recently seen.
For example, finding your keys on a red key chain would be easier if you had previously reached for a red apple, compared to if you had chosen a yellow banana for your snack. This effect is called “priming.” This priming also occurs for items that are only conceptually related — the word “KEYS” doesn’t look like your keys, yet the facilitation still occurs.
And if we want to strengthen that bias? Perform an action while being primed with an image or, according to the newest research, with a word, and you’ll find your keys even faster.
“Things we act on are, by definition, ‘important’ because we’ve chosen to make an action,” Abrams said. Making an action may produce a signal in the brain that what you’re seeing is more important than if you just observed it, passively.
In the study, published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Abrams and Blaire J. Weidler of the University of Toronto, participants performed a pair of ostensibly unrelated tasks.
Seated at a computer, the screen first flashed either the word “Go” or “No.” If the screen flashed “Go,” the study participant was to press a button when the priming word (e.g., “KEYS”) appeared. If they initially saw “No,” however, they were told just to look at the word.
Next, participants searched a “scene” on the screen that contained two pictures. They were told to find a left or right arrow and indicate which was present (while ignoring up-or-down arrows). The arrows were superimposed on the pictures (but the content of the pictures was unimportant for the task). Importantly, one picture always represented the priming word (a picture of keys). The other picture was of a different, unrelated object.
Although the pictures were unrelated to the arrow-finding task, on some trials the arrow was on the prime-matching picture (keys), whereas on the other trials, the arrow was on the other picture.
Subjects were able to locate the left or right arrow faster when it was on the picture of keys than when it was on the random picture — as to be expected based on the established principle of priming.
The important novel finding of this research was that participants located the arrow faster still if the priming had involved an action — that earlier button press.
In practice, this priming could have a number of applications. For example, Abrams said, imagine priming baggage screeners with the word “KNIFE.” That obviously wouldn’t allow screeners to see something that was invisible, but, he said, “That might draw their attention to a knife in their visual field,” something that may have otherwise gone undetected in the visual clutter of a disorganized suitcase.
“In order for us to behave efficiently in the world, we have to make good choices about which of the many objects in a scene we are going to be processing,” Abrams said. “These experiments reveal one mechanism that helps us make those choices.”
On May 29, ABC cancelled its “Roseanne” revival after an ugly tweet from the show’s eponymous star.
In this Q&A, film scholar Gaylyn Studlar, the David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and director of the Film & Media Studies Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, examines the dangers of Twitter, the speed of cancellation and the influence of diversity in the boardroom.
Roseanne Barr, a television star, was brought down by her use of Twitter. What does this say about the interplay of social media and contemporary celebrity?
Gaylyn Studlar.(Photo: James Byard/Washington University)
This is a new world of convergence. A single tweet can communicate a celebrity’s thoughts and feelings instantaneously to thousands, if not millions. And tweets tend to be interpreted as the celebrity at her or his most authentic, offering unfiltered truthfulness. That can support a sense of intimacy — but for the impulsive, it’s also very dangerous.
In the cases surrounding the trial of Bill Cosby and the public allegations against Kevin Spacey, time passed before decisions were made regarding programming that involved them. But “Roseanne” was cancelled in a matter of hours. Has so big a hit ever been so summarily terminated?
No, I don’t think it has — but ABC could not let the situation go on for long. The controversy was too socially divisive. It had the potential to overwhelm discussions about the network and to alienate both viewers and advertisers.
Barr’s identification of herself as a Trump supporter — one who feels comfortable telling an explicitly racist “joke” — might have intensified the network’s worry. What happens if Trump weighs in? And of course, he did.
Outrageous rule-breaking is a core element of Barr’s persona, and she has made racist and deeply offensive comments before. But ABC knowingly took the risk of giving her a platform in the hope that appealing to “heartland” America would lift them from the bottom of the ratings barrel. In the wake of this controversy, ABC might simply have believed that Barr’s popularity had peaked.
ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey, who announced the decision, is African-American. Does the speed of cancellation speak to the power of diversity in the executive suite?
Ms. Dungey was not the top executive who might have made the announcement. Her boss, Ben Sherwood, or his boss, Robert Iger, may have tapped her for any number of reasons. But certainly her opinion could have played a crucial role. And demonstrating that ABC includes an African-American executive with the power to make such a decision underlines the idea that the company will not tolerate racism.
So making Ms. Dungey the spokesperson seems a very smart move. Indeed, it was so smart that Barr is reduced to blaming her remarks on a sleep aid!
Let’s not forget that Roseanne has aimed similar racist slurs at former ambassador Susan Rice. She’s a repeat offender. If this story tells us anything, it’s that Hollywood can tolerate celebrity repeat offenders as long as they’re making money.
A field experiment with anole lizards showed not only that natural selection acts on behavioral traits, but also that selection for behavior can occur simultaneously to selection on other traits, such as body size and shape. (Image: Oriol Lapiedra)
Some people argue that animals have personalities: shy, bold, aggressive.
It’s more than just cocktail party conversation for anole lizards, whose risk-taking behavior can mean the difference between life and death.
For anoles in the Caribbean islands, natural selection predictably favors exploratory behavior in the absence of predators, and ground avoidance when predators are around, according to a new experimental field study forthcoming in the June 1 issue of Science.
Losos
“Research on animal personalities has recently generated a lot of interest from all over the world,” said Oriol Lapiedra, a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications in Catalonia, Spain, who conducted this work with Jonathan Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished Professor and professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, while both were still at Harvard University.
“We wanted to figure out if, as happens with morphology, natural selection favors different animal behaviors under contrasting environmental conditions,” Lapiedra said.
“In recent years, evolutionary biologists have realized that when environmental conditions change, natural selection can rapidly lead to evolutionary change,” Losos said.
“That means that we can conduct experimental studies on evolution in nature and hope to get a detectable outcome in just a few years,” Losos said. “And the Bahamas, with thousands of tiny little islands available to serve as evolutionary test tubes, is just the place for work of this sort.”
To conduct the experiment, researchers placed 274 adult Anolis sagrei lizards on eight islands in the Caribbean. A recent hurricane had removed lizards from most of these islands; the experimental anoles were relocated from other similar nearby islands.
Before they were moved, they underwent a kind of lizard stress test.
A natural predator of the anole: the curly-tailed lizard, Leiocephalus carinatus. (Image: Oriol Lapiedra)
Researchers placed each anole in a wooden box and put the box on the floor of a container that also held one of the lizard’s natural predators — a larger, curly-tailed lizard, Leiocephalus carinatus, itself contained in a clear plastic box. The researchers then opened the door of anole’s wooden box so that he or she could see the predator, and also a high, safe perch nearby. After three minutes of eying the enemy, or “habituation,” the threatening predator was removed from the container.
The researchers gave the anoles a five-minute breather, then the box door was lifted again. The researchers measured how long it took for an anole to emerge from its refuge and start exploring, and the amount of time it spent on the ground before climbing to safety on the perch.
Each anole was individually tagged. After a few quick hind-leg measurements, they were plopped down in their new island homes.
Anoles on four of the eight experimental islands enjoyed a kind of lizard Shangri-La of predator-free bliss. But on the other islands, those larger curly-tailed lizards were also installed a few days later.
After four months, the researchers came back to see how the colonists had fared.
The results lined up with what the researchers had predicted. On predator-free islands, the “risk takers” — lizards that were fastest to start exploring a new environment — were the best survivors, perhaps because they were better able to take advantage of food available on the ground. Exploratory behavior did not affect survival on the islands that had predators.
Conversely, time spent exposed on the ground was negatively related to survival on predator-inhabited islands, but did not affect survival on the predator-free islands.
“Our field experiment showed not only that natural selection acts on behavioral traits, but also that selection for behavior can occur simultaneously to selection on other traits, such as body size and shape,” Lapiedra said.
Future experiments will need to tackle the question of what happens in the long term. Will bolder lizards have more children and change the population? For now it appears that Mother Nature agrees — luck is usually on the side of those who take chances and risks.
This study was supported by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (Catalonia, Spain) and the National Science Foundation.
An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. (Image: Lucas Taylor, CERN)
Particle accelerators are powerful devices that use electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles like electrons or protons at speeds close to the speed of light, then smash them head-on. What happens in a blink of an eye during these high-speed collisions can tell us about some of the fundamental secrets of nature.
In a new paper in the June 1 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, Bhupal Dev, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how future accelerators could crash together charged particles in a new way to shed light on their behavior.
Theorists like Dev are working to outline the big ideas that will shape the experimental approach for next-generation colliders, such as the International Linear Collider, to be built in Japan, or the Circular Electron-Positron Collider, proposed in China.
Dev, who wrote the paper with postdoctoral fellow Yongchao Zhang from Washington University and Rabi Mohapatra from the University of Maryland, is looking for a clear signal of something beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
Dev
“There is strong experimental evidence that there is indeed some new physics lurking in the lepton sector,” Dev said.
He and his collaborators believe a new collider built to crash together point-like, charged particles called leptons, which have no internal structure, is the best bet for finding this new physics.
This approach is different from the one employed at today’s most famous particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, researchers used the LHC to discover the Higgs boson, the particle that supposedly gives mass to all elementary particles.
But there are profound questions that the LHC is not ideally suited to answer.
Dev’s new work on lepton colliders was initially motivated by the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations. Neutrinos are the electrically neutral counterpart of the charged leptons, and they have been observed to change from one species to another in a quantum-mechanical way. This suggests a tiny, but non-zero, mass for neutrinos.
“Ever since we directly observed neutrino oscillations, researchers have been trying to see the equivalent effect in the charged siblings of neutrinos, such as muons transforming into electrons,” Dev said.
This would give a better understanding of the neutrino mass generation, which is difficult to explain by the same Higgs mechanism as for other elementary particles.
But so far, searches for such rare processes have been confined to energies much lower than those expected on the new physics scale.
In their new paper, Dev and colleagues propose how to search for the evidence of lepton “flavor violation”— the moment of transformation of charged particles into other types of charged particles — at the high energy frontier, using the new colliders. In the Standard Model, these effects are known to be negligible. Therefore, any positive signal would be a sign of new physics.
In particular, they suggest one possibility that arises due to the presence of a new type of Higgs boson that might be responsible for the tiny neutrino masses.
The invention of agriculture changed humans and the environment forever, and over thousands of years, the practice originated independently in at least a dozen different places. But why did agriculture begin in those places, at those particular times in human history?
Using a new methodological approach, Colorado State University and Washington University in St. Louis researchers have uncovered evidence that underscores one long-debated theory: that agriculture arose out of moments of surplus, when environmental conditions were improving and populations lived in greater densities.
Bruno Vilela, postdoctoral researcher in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a first author on this study. Other Washington University co-authors include Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology, and postdoctoral researcher Ty Tuff.
Predicting into the past
Studying the depths of human history is challenging, as little data are available when looking back tens of thousands of years. Scientists typically rely on archeological evidence, but getting a broad picture is difficult because archeological digs cover relatively small areas.
To overcome these limitations, the researchers modeled correlations between the environment, cultural traits and population densities of relatively recent foraging societies, which used hunting, fishing and gathering to obtain food.
Among the factors they considered as possible predictors of population density: environmental productivity; environmental stability; the average distance traveled when people in a community moved to a new location; whether people owned land or other resources; and distance to the nearest coast.
This model, the team found, did a remarkably good job at predicting recent population densities, which led the researchers to pair the model with data on past climate. In doing so, they could hindcast — or predict into the past — the potential population density of the entire globe dating back thousands of years.
Population maps
This study was the first to produce maps of potential population densities dating back as far as 21,000 years. The researchers used these maps to examine conditions that existed in each of the 12 centers of origin, at the point in time that agricultural practices began.
Although the centers of origin varied in time by thousands of years and ranged from the New Guinea Highlands to Central America and the Middle East, they all had one thing in common: improving environmental conditions and the potential for higher population densities.
Researchers believe that improving environmental conditions may have allowed people the luxury of tinkering with new ideas and that having more people living in one place would allow ideas to be shared and honed, with sparks of innovation following.
The research team is now exploring other applications for the maps they produced.
This story is adapted from a news release by Colorado State University.
Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was among the honorees at the 2018 Royal Vagabonds Leadership Awards. The ceremony took place earlier this spring at the Renaissance St. Louis Airport Hotel.
Early
Early received one of nine awards for Excellence in Civic Engagement. Also receiving the honor were Washington University alumni Keith Griffin II, Mary Attyberry Polk, and the team of Alex Lee, Johnny Wang and Al Li. Alumna Anna Crosslin received an Executive Leadership Award.
The Royal Vagabonds were founded in the early 1930s as a social club for professional young men of color. The leadership awards recognize outstanding individuals making positive contributions to the St. Louis community in the areas of diversity and inclusion, business and economic development, health, and care for families and children.
Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recognized eight outstanding alumni and supporters of the school during its 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards dinner, held April 25 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis.
