Graduate students develop and lead the department’s annual safety training. Students and staff can participate in a “peer safety group” that’s truly made up of their peers. There are opportunities to win gift cards for submitting near-miss reports or identifying a “safety star.”
“Washington University in St. Louis received an Award of Honor for the chemistry department’s multipronged approach to improving research safety culture. The department has become a model for other departments at the university,” Peter K. Dorhout, president of the American Chemical Society, said in a July comment in Chemical & Engineering News.
In the application submitted by Bruce Backus, assistant vice chancellor for environmental health and safety, Washington University summarized its safety culture innovations as follows:
Backus
Leadership from the top
Safety education from the beginning for incoming graduate students
Take ownership and responsibility for one’s own safety program and training
Reward, don’t stigmatize, near-miss reporting
Partner with industry safety experts to take safety culture and programs to a higher level
Safety committees led by graduate students and front-line researchers, supported and encouraged by department leaders
The department shares its knowledge and safety expertise with others and actively promotes inclusion of those outside of the department in safety initiatives
Read the application materials in full, including descriptions of Washington University innovations.
Volcanic craters, fumeroles and hot springs mark the rugged landscape of São Miguel island, in the remote Portuguese Azores, where undergraduate students from Washington University in St. Louis traveled to study field geology techniques during their 2018 spring break.
In this upper-division field geology course (EPS496), the students advanced their skills in field data collection and interpretation at the triple junction of the American, African and European tectonic plates. The course was led by Alexander S. Bradley and Philip Skemer, both associate professors of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences.
Paul Tran, a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of five young poets awarded a $25,800 prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.
Announced Aug. 28, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships are among the largest awards offered to young poets in the United States. The awards are intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and are open to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age.
Tran, who also serves as poetry editor for The Offing, has published work in Poetry, TheNew Yorker, Boston Review and the Norton anthology “Inheriting the War”(2017), among many others.
“I write to investigate what goodness looks like in the face of such evil,” Tran told the Poetry Foundation, “to determine, announce, and celebrate the sophistication, tenacity, audacity, and ferocity of goodness and altruism and love in our world.”
They are currently working on their first poetry collection, which examines intergenerational trauma, sexual violence and the U.S. empire after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
In 2017, Tran became the first Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam in more than two decades. Other honors include a 2018 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, top-10 showings at three consecutive National Poetry Slams, and placing at the Individual World Poetry Slam.
In addition to Tran, the 2018 poetry fellows include Safia Elhillo, Hieu Minh Nguyen, sam sax and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Work by all five will be featured in the December issue of Poetry. Previous fellows include Washington University alumnus Phillip B. Williams, who received the award in 2013.
Tran performs at the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals in 2015. Full video here.
About 94 million years ago, something happened that led to an unusually high amount of organic material being preserved in oceans around the world.
The burial of this organic carbon – over about a half million years – pulled an enormous amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere and had a major impact on Earth’s climate.
The basic assumption has been that some combination of super-giant algae blooms and low levels of oxygen in the ocean allowed the organic carbon from these blooms to be preserved in sediments.
New research from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis shows that there is another process by which this carbon was preserved. Organic matter sulfurization — which previously had been thought to act over timescales of tens of thousands of years — can actually occur much faster, according to research published this week in the journal Nature Communications.
This change in timescales may have sizable implications for how scientists understand the past and future of the Earth’s climate.
Organic matter sulfurization reactions can occur on the timescale of just hours to days, according to the paper, “Organic carbon burial during OAE2 driven by changes in the locus of organic matter sulfurization.”
A research project led by Morgan Reed Raven while she was a fellow in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University sheds new light on the process by which organic carbon was preserved. “These rapid sulfur reactions are where the story is at,” she said.
“We can even induce them in 24 hours in the lab,” said Morgan Reed Raven, assistant professor in earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Raven led this research as the Agouron Geobiology Fellow at Washington University.
The finding focused on a layer of sediment in the south of France from that time period, about 94 million years ago, known as the Ocean Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2). The site is more typical of other places and times on the planet then sites where many previous studies focused. For this reason, Raven said, “There are all sorts of places on Earth today where rapid sulfurization is on the table as a major mechanism for impacting how much carbon is preserved.”
The potential widespread nature of sulfurization as a manner of carbon preservation means that our understanding of the history of oxygen in the ocean may need to be reevaluated.
The amount of sedimentary carbon has acted as a kind of proxy for oxygen levels in the ocean. The more carbon in the sediment, the thinking went, the less oxygen was in the ocean. (If there’s no oxygen, there are no microbes or animals to eat organic material, so when that material dies, it accumulates in the ocean floor).
Fike
“That is probably still correct,” said David Fike, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and associate director of the International Center for Energy, Environment & Sustainability (InCEES). “But Morgan showed this other process. Even with oxygen in the system, if there is sulfur in the organic matter, nothing can easily eat it.” The matter, he said, will still be preserved in the sediment.
“People have known about sulfurization, but they thought it was slow and not that important environmentally,” Fike said. “What Morgan has been able to show is that it is a much more efficient and powerful way to lock up matter, to trap the organics.”
Going forward, he said, this work highlights an additional process that will be important to include in climate modelling.
“We hope that through this paper and others,” Fike said, “modelers will see this as an important process to incorporate into their systems.”
Raven has done research in a variety of environments, the results of which will be published in forthcoming papers. “The hypotheses that came out of this paper do seem to be holding up,” she said. “And for understanding the formation of many extremely organic carbon-rich sediments, these rapid sulfur reactions are where the story is at.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Aquino studied at the Conservatoire National du Strasbourg in France and at Florida International University, where he earned a master’s degree in orchestral conducting. His composition “Espacio Ritual” received its European premiere from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in 2015. Other orchestral works have been performed by international ensembles including the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, the Filarmónica Boca del Rio in Mexico and the National Symphony of El Salvador.
Aquino currently serves as musical director for Winter Opera St. Louis, musical director for the Música Sacra concert series in Santo Domingo and director of orchestral studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He previously held posts as director of the National Conservatory of Music, music director of the National Youth Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of “El Sistema” in the Dominican Republic.
It begins underground, in somber galleries recounting slavery’s brutality. It spirals upward, through the Civil War and segregation, into sun-drenched spaces recounting the civil rights era and Black Lives Matter. It’s a tale of challenges faced and works yet to be accomplished.
Granted biennially, the prize honors the lifetime work of a noted scholar, writer or artist who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the world of letters or the arts. Previous winners include Orhan Pamuk (2006), Michael Pollan (2008), Francine Prose (2010), Ken Burns (2012), Marjorie Perloff (2014) and Bill T. Jones (2016).
“David Adjaye is one of the most influential architects of his generation, known for major public spaces in North America, Europe and Africa,” said Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, which administers the award. “But what sets Adjaye apart from his contemporaries is his humanistic approach to design. His work embodies the human experience in all its trauma, beauty and wonder.”
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, served on the selection committee. She added, “David Adjaye is an architect with artistic and historical inclinations that beckon people inside his structures, but also reveal stories and identities.
“His work on the museum interweaves black cultural modernity in the U.S. with its African precursors in ways that remind us of a complex and divided past but also move us into a common future,” Maffly-Kipp said. “He is able to bring a humanistic vision of space and materiality to life in astounding ways.”
Adjaye will receive the prize, which is accompanied by a $25,000 award, during a public ceremony in Hillman Hall’s Clark-Fox Forum. For more information, visit the Center for the Humanities site.
About Adjaye
Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye has won international renown for his sculptural facility, broadly ranging influences, attention to existing contexts and ingenious use of materials. Adjaye Associates, which he founded in 2000, now has offices in London, New York and Accra, and has completed major projects in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Sugar Hill is a mixed-use housing development in New York City’s Harlem. (Photo: Ed Reeve, courtesy of Adjaye Associates)
In addition to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which was named Cultural Event of the Year by The New York Times, major projects include: the Idea Stores in London (2005), which pioneered a new approach to library services; the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO (2010); and the Sugar Hill mixed-use social housing development in New York City’s Harlem (2015). Ongoing projects include a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, the recently announced National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra, and the National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London.
Adjaye is known for his frequent collaborations with contemporary artists on installations and exhibitions. Most notably, he designed the 56th Venice Art Biennale with curator Okwui Enwezor (2015). The Upper Room, featuring 13 paintings by Chris Ofili (2002), is now part of the permanent collection of Tate Britain. Other examples include Within Reach, a second installation with Ofili in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art for the 21st Century Pavilion, which was designed to show Your Black Horizon, a projection work by Olafur Eliasson, at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Adjaye’s numerous honors include the 2011 Design Miami/Artist of the Year, the Wall Street Journal’s 2013 Innovator Award and the 2016 Panerai London Design Medal from the London Design Festival. In 2017, Adjaye received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for services to architecture and was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the year by Time magazine.
Anika Walke, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is co-recipient of a 2018 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Anika Walke
The three-year, $296,455 grant will support “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events.” Part of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, the project will use information from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos to create a historical geographic information system (GIS) model of 1,400 Nazi-era Jewish ghettos.
Anne Knowles, the Colonel James C. McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine, is project director. Walke and Paul Jaskot of Duke University serve as co-directors. The research team also includes geographers and historians at Stanford University, Texas State University, Bristol University and the University of Maine.
“Believe insomething, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt.”
When Nike tweeted these words on Labor Day over an image of quarterback Colin Kaepernick — who is advancing his legal claim that the NFL is blackballing him — the fan response was swift and vehement but also strikingly predictable, says Noah Cohan, a lecturer in American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Noah Cohan
“The online backlash featured many of the hallmarks of the scorned sports fan video trope,” said Cohan, who studies sports narratives and fandom. “Nike clothing and accessories were defaced or burned. Angry fans ranted and vowed to boycott the apparel maker forever.
“These kinds of protests were popularized in theaftermath of LeBron James’ ‘Decision’ to leave Cleveland in 2010, but they’ve also bled into the political arena,” Cohan said. “Earlier this year, NRA supporters blew up their Yeti coolers when the company discontinued a discount for the gun lobby’s foundation.
“Such displays demonstrate the strength of the fan’s connection to an entity over which they have no control, beyond personal narratives and consumerism. They represent one of the only means by which such fans feel they can lash out when disappointed — but they’re also troubling symbolic representations of violence, particularly when the athlete who sparks their anger is African-American. They evoke a time when black bodies, not merely their consumptive representation, were the things being torn apart and burned.
“Kaepernick’s activism has played out in a time of upheaval in American political and social life, one marked by a president who feels no compunction about calling a demonstrating athlete a ‘son of a bitch’ who should be ‘fired.’ But reactionary Trump supporters were not alone in questioning the ad. Even those who support Kaepernick’s protest had reservations about Nike’s sponsorship of his message.
“It’s worth asking: What does it mean when a multi-billion-dollar company sanctions protest? Is Kaepernick’s work merely amplified by the corporate megaphone, or is it inescapably compromised? Let’s not forget, Nike sponsorship led Michael Jordan to demur taking political stands, apocryphally asserting that ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’ Does Nike’s sponsorship of Kaepernick mark a change in their sense of corporate responsibility, or merely a calculation about the flow of cultural capital?
“Nike is turning toward a younger, more diverse America because they’ve calculated that Trumpian claims about compulsory patriotism and black athletic obedience will not win out. In effect, they’re attempting to embrace Muhammad Ali during the 1960s — when his anti-war stance and refusal to serve made him a pariah to the older white American establishment — instead of waiting until the 1990s, when Ali’s resistance had been stripped of its urgency.
“In endorsing Kaepernick’s message, Nike seeks to profit from the labor of black athletes no less than they did in embracing Michael Jordan’s dunking ability. Whether that profit motive will prove exploitative depends on Kaepernick’s continued agency, his desire and ability to speak his truth regardless of what Nike wants him to ‘#JustDo’.”
Francisco Buera has been named the Sam B. Cook Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He was installed May 7 at a ceremony in Ridgley Hall’s Holmes Lounge.
Buera’s research and scholarly expertise focus on the patterns of economic development across countries and over time. Before joining the Arts & Sciences faculty at Washington University, he served as a senior economist and research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He previously held positions at University of California, Los Angeles, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University.
The endowed professorship was made possible by a generous gift from the late Sam B. Cook, a prominent banker and philanthropist who had served as president and chief executive officer of Central Bancompany. A former member of the Washington University Board of Trustees, Cook was a longtime advocate of higher education in Missouri who cared deeply about academic affairs and believed that, with the right teacher, economics could be fascinating to learn.
“Sam Cook’s legacy at Washington University is deep and rich,” Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said. “His vision for higher education — particularly in the field of economics — was inspirational. We are indebted to him for his valuable contributions as a university trustee and for his generosity and his enthusiasm for teaching and learning. We are proud to carry on his passion for economics through his enduring gift.”
“When Sam Cook endowed this professorship in his name, he made it clear that he believed in the power of economics to enlighten and inform students across a wide variety of academic disciplines,” said Barbara A. Schaal, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor. “Francisco Buera is an outstanding scholar in the field, one whose research has both theoretical impact and practical implications that can make a real-world difference. This is the type of scholarship that embodies the spirit of Mr. Cook’s intention.”
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Buera completed his undergraduate studies in economics at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in 1993. By that time, he already had lived through three hyperinflations, among other financial and banking crises in the country, which inspired him to seek an alternative to Argentina’s long history of failed development policies. He began graduate work at the University of Chicago to design quantitative macroeconomic models that can be used to evaluate alternative macroeconomic policies.
Buera’s research has focused on particular aspects of economic development, such as the structural changes associated with development; the role of financial frictions in affecting the process; and the diffusion of technologies, economic policies and institutions across countries. His work aims to fill the gap between empirical and theoretical work in the field and lies at the intersection of macro and development. The associate editor of the Review of Economic Studies and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Buera’s work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and the Consortium of Financial Systems and Poverty at the University of Chicago.
About Sam B. Cook
Believing there was a critical need for the next generation of leaders to have a solid understanding of macroeconomic theory and free-market principles, Cook was a lifelong supporter of higher education and the field of economics in particular. He attended the University of Missouri for two years before his education was interrupted when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 and was called to active duty in World War II. He served in France, Belgium and Germany, earning the Meritorious Service Award. He was honorably discharged in 1946 at the rank of captain in the 3rd Infantry Division.
Upon returning to the United States, Cook enrolled at Yale University, from which he graduated in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree and special honors in economics. He began his banking career at Chase Manhattan National Bank in New York City. He returned to Missouri in 1950 to join his father at Central Missouri Trust Company, where he became president and chief executive officer in 1961 and formed Central Bancompany in 1970. He served as chairman of the board of The Central Trust Bank and Central Bancompany from 1981 until 2008, when he stepped down from active leadership and his son, S. Bryan Cook, was named president and CEO of the company. Under Sam Cook’s leadership, Central Bancompany grew to be one of the largest and most respected bank holding companies in Missouri. It now has assets of $12 billion, with 13 affiliates in four states, and continues to be listed on Forbes’ list of “Best Banks in America.”
In addition to serving on the Washington University Board of Trustees, Cook also was a member of the boards of William Woods University and the University of Missouri. He also served on statewide committees and boards charged with improving Missouri’s public higher education system. In his later years, Cook was a philanthropist for causes that were important to him. Along with his gift to Washington University, he also established a chair in economics at the University of Missouri and contributed to Yale University. He died in 2016 at age 94.
Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded the American Sociological Association’s 2018 Public Understanding of Sociology Award at the ASA’s 113th meeting Aug. 12 in Philadelphia.
Wingfield, a regular contributing columnist for Inside Higher Ed, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic and other news outlets, is the author several popular books, most recently “No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work,” She is currently at work on her next book, “Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy,” which is scheduled for publication in 2019 by University of California Press.
Adia Harvey Wingfield comments on her acceptance of the American Sociological Association’s 2018 Public Sociology Award. Click to listen.
In presenting Wingfield with its award for “exemplary contributions to advance the public understanding of sociology and sociological research,” ASA sociologist Jose Calderon described her as a “nationally known public voice” who has made “profound contributions” to our understanding of diversity, race and gender at work.
In her acceptance, Wingfield implored others in the sociology community to share their own important work through blog posts, op-eds, community engagement and other routes: “I strongly encourage everyone to get their work out into the public sphere,” she said. “Your voice matters and your work matters, and the more we engage as sociologists with the broader public, the better and more effective our social science can be.”
Steven Frankel is not hungry. He just wants to talk about noodles.
Frankel is picturing a big bowl of noodles — and whether, and when, the noodles might loop back around on themselves — infinitely extruded, as they might be, from some sort of cosmic pasta maker.
The noodles are a simplified way for Frankel, assistant professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to describe a link between the geometry of a space and the dynamics of that space — how the space changes over time. It’s all part of his first solo-authored paper in the leading journal of his field, the Annals of Mathematics.
Geometrists and dynamicists tend to form two separate camps in math, but Frankel prefers to think about these things in combination. And he isn’t alone. In June 2018, he traveled to Shenzhen, China, to present some of his work as part of the International Conference on Dynamical Systems.
“You can use some of the dynamical ideas to get some insight into the geometry of a space,” Frankel said. “It gives you some way of breaking up a three-dimensional space into one-dimensional strands. And you can hope that if you can understand these one-dimensional strands, then you also understand how they fit together — to get some insight into your space.”
Picture a flow as a shallow sheet of liquid in motion. If you could identify a single molecule in that flow, and track how it moves over time, you can imagine building a kind of map that shows where the point went and when.
If instead of moving on the surface of a sheet, the flow moved across a three-dimensional space with different geometric properties, you could still build a map of a point’s location over time. But the map would would look different: The space would be filled up with strands or curves that represent the paths of each point — those noodles again.
Frankel’s new paper, Coarse hyperbolicity and closed orbits for quasigeodesic flows, proves a conjecture of Danny Calegari, the University of Chicago mathematician who was Frankel’s former adviser and mentor. Calegari predicted that these flows would have closed orbits — meaning that some of them would necessarily flow back to where they started; Frankel did the heavy lifting to prove that it was true.
“There’s a relationship between these dynamical phenomena that appear — the stationary points and the recurring points, for example — and the large-scale structure of the underlying space that this dynamic structure is represented by,” Frankel said.
Frankel started off in engineering as an undergraduate at Cooper Union, but soon found his passion in pure mathematics. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2013, after following Calegari to the United Kingdom from the California Institute of Technology in 2011. Frankel then taught math at Yale University for four years.
He taught his first class at Washington University in the fall of 2017.
“Every student was fantastic,” said Frankel, about the undergraduates in the upper-division course in graph theory. “Not everyone was a superstar. But, by the end, everyone was comfortable asking questions in the middle of class — and interrupting me when they thought I was wrong.
“They were really engaged in learning,” Frankel said. “I can’t overstate how important that is.
“There’s this myth that learning mathematics is about memorizing a bunch of theorems and learning how to plug them together,” he said. “The best way to learn is to have a question in mind — and to poke at it, and try to answer it yourself. And that requires a level of engagement on the part of the student that you don’t find everywhere.”
Which brings us back to the pasta, and the key findings from his paper.
“It’s the silliest but still accurate way of saying what this paper says,” Frankel said. “If you have a bowl and it’s filled with noodles that don’t bunch up too much, then some of those noodles have to form loops.”
But are the noodles linguine? Or rigatoni?
Frankel doesn’t make you feel silly for asking. (The answer: linguine)
“The thing with mathematics is that there are no obvious questions,” Frankel said. “In mathematics, there are no obvious questions because you’re not dealing with objects that are right in front of you.”
He is quick to point out the influence of previous generations, and also the current work of people around him in a department.
“Mathematics is a community activity, not an individual one,” Frankel said. “I can’t just tell myself to sit in that seat and think. I can’t instruct myself to come up with something interesting out of the blue.
“For some reason, it’s just the way our minds work. You need to be guided by something. The questions or conjectures that you find in mathematics — they may be interesting in their own right, they may be interesting because of where they lead you,” he said. “It’s just as much — if not more important — to find the right questions to ask, as it is to be able to answer those questions.”
A woman goes to the doctor for a mammogram. The result comes back positive. “This doesn’t necessarily mean you have cancer, false positives are common,” her doctor might say. Maybe the patient is also given a pamphlet with some statistics about mortality and survival rates.
But the test did come back “positive,” the patient thinks, so maybe the doctor is just trying to make her feel better. Maybe the patient doesn’t understand the difference between mortality and survival rates and hasn’t thought about statistics since a class in high school.
To help patients better understand their health data and the risks and benefits of treatment options, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $174,254 grant to Alvitta Ottley, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ottley
“Lots of people are receiving test results and they don’t understand them,” Ottley said. “They have to understand procedures and their risks, and then there are false positives and false negatives. My job is to take this somewhat complex statistical information and present it in ways people can understand.”
Ottley has worked on general visualization problems that ask how our individual psychology affects the way we receive information and make decisions. She also has built tools for facilitating communication between doctors and patients.
In this current project, however, the tools she is building are not for experts, they’re for patients with no expertise in medicine or statistics.
To be sure, there already exist plenty of formats for visually describing these things to laypeople. The most popular of these formats, according to Ottley, is the icon array. A single icon array can be used to indicate, for instance, rates of breast cancer, including people who were accurately tested as well as those who received false negative results.
Such a graphic might use symbols representing people. In the example pictured, there are 10 rows by seven columns, with an additional five symbols set somewhat apart from the main grid.
All 75 symbols represent people diagnosed with breast cancer.
Purple symbols represent those who died from the disease. Blue symbols represent those who were treated and survived. Of those 50 symbols, 17 are outlined in pink. They represent overdiagnosis — people whose cancers would not have been harmful if left untreated.
The five pink symbols that are set apart from the main grid represent people who would have died if not for the screening.
This icon array is intended to clarify the relationship between screenings and breast cancer (Graphic: Cancer Research UK)
“These can be hard to understand,” Ottley said of icon arrays. “It is especially confusing to someone with no statistical training nor numerical skills. We’re trying to figure out the best way to represent this.”
Her lab is not just looking at how to render easy-to-understand images, but also whether or not images are truly the best way to represent data.
Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, Ottley wondered, would it make things even clearer if text were added to visualizations?
Her past work indicated that it will not. “What we’ve found is that if I give you text alone, you’re not really good at understanding it. If I give you data visualization alone, you’re just a little bit better. But if I give you both, it’s completely confusing.” Ottley said. “You have to read the text and understand that, and then try to figure out the visualization, and then determine how the two relate.”
Complicating the issue, Ottley also found that measures of “spatial ability” can determine a person’s success in reasoning with medical statistics.
To get to the bottom of the question, members of Ottley’s lab will be looking at approaches that have been successful in decreasing cognitive load — the amount of information a person needs access to in their working memory — and using those approaches to design easier-to-understand visualizations.
Using eye tracking, the group will determine in what order people are absorbing information and how well they understand it.
“We will look at what order leads to successful decision making,” Ottley said. “Perhaps everyone who makes the right decision — assuming there is a right decision — consumes the information in a specific order. If we can identify successful strategies and pathways, we can redesign visual representation so that people are more likely to use these pathways.”
The lab will also look at decision biases: why some people may be prone to taking action because — or in spite of — the information they’ve received.
Ottley understands that it’s more than statistics that lead a patient to choose or forgo medical treatment. There is a large emotional component, as well. “If a doctor says, ‘you have cancer,’ some people might just say, ‘OK, let’s do this,’ and opt for treatment without a second thought,” she said.
Then, there are some people who would like to know as much as they can. “Why not give these people the options and the tools to really, truly understand the data?” Ottley asked. The decisions can be difficult, and to some, providing all of this information might seem like placing the burden on an already-anxious patient.
Ottley sees it differently, however, and hopes to make it easier for others to see, not just the data, but the potential benefits of improved visualization. Instead of burdening patients, she said, “Improved data visualization could empower them.”
The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 94 tenured/tenure-track and 28 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 1,200 graduate students and 20,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.
Healthy adults who learn information more quickly than their peers also have better long-term retention for the material despite spending less time studying it, a new study from psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis finds.
“Quicker learning appears to be more durable learning,” said Christopher L. Zerr, lead author and doctoral student in psychological & brain sciences in Arts & Sciences. “Even though people who learned the material in less time had less actual exposure to the material they were trying to learn, they still managed to demonstrate better retention of the material across delays ranging from minutes to days.”
Zerr
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, tested a novel measure to gauge differences in how quickly and well people learn and retain information. The research team wanted to gain a clearer understanding of how individual variations in rate of learning relate to long-term memory.
Learning and memory tests are often designed for use in neuropsychological settings, such as detecting cognitive impairments or aging-related deficits. Most existing tests are not sensitive enough to detect individual differences in a neurologically healthy population, and young, healthy adults tend to score near or at maximum performance on these tests.
Results from a previous study indicated that while participants were learning Lithuanian-English word pairs, those with relatively less neural activity in the default mode network — a network that is suppressed while directing attention to external information — tended to show better retention later on. This suggests that more effective word-pair learning is associated with a better allocation of attentional resources.
But is this learning ability stable or does it vary from day to day? Zerr and colleagues used this word pair task to observe individual differences in learning speed and retention over multiple days, and even years.
In the first experiment, almost 300 participants learned two lists of 45 equally difficult Lithuanian-English word pairs over two days for a total of 90 word pairs. The participants studied 45 pairs each day, which were displayed for four seconds each, and then completed an initial learning test where they typed the English equivalent for the Lithuanian prompt word. After responding, the participants viewed the correct pairing as feedback, and their response accuracy was collected as a measure of initial learning.
In this activity, participants had to respond correctly to all 45 word pairs in a test once — as soon as the participant gave a correct response for a pair, that pair would drop out of future tests. The researchers measured participants’ learning speed, or the number of tests an individual needed to answer a word pair correctly. Participants then played a distractor game of Tetris and completed a final test of all 45 word pairs without feedback. They repeated this procedure on the second day with a new set of 45 word pairs.
The results showed that participants varied significantly in their learning curves for the initial test, learning speed and the final test. Individuals who scored better on the initial test also tended to learn more quickly, meaning they needed fewer tests to correctly answer all 45 pairs. Those who learned faster also had better scores on the final test, and subjects who scored higher on the initial test remembered more on the final one.
Because performance on the initial test, learning speed and final test were intercorrelated, the researchers combined the scores to create a “learning-efficiency score” for each person.
McDermott
“In each case, initial learning speed proved to be a strong predictor of long-term retention,” said senior author Kathleen B. McDermott, professor of psychological & brain Sciences at Washington University.
In a second study, the researchers tested reliability of the learning-efficiency measure over time. Ninety-two participants completed the same learning-efficiency task, and the researchers measured their neural activity in an MRI scanner as they learned the word pairs.
Forty-six of the original participants returned for a follow-up three years later. They completed a word pair test, as well as measures of processing speed, general memory ability and intellectual ability.
The researchers observed stable performance at the three-year follow-up: Learning speed in the initial session predicted long-term retention, meaning that subjects who learned the word pairs more quickly in the first encounter also learned new word pairs more quickly three years later. Processing speed, general memory ability and intellectual ability were also related to initial learning-efficiency scores and scores at follow-up, indicating that the measure was highly valid.
The researchers suggest that individual differences in learning efficiency may be due to certain cognitive mechanisms. For example, people with better attentional control can allocate attention more effectively while learning material and avoid distraction and forgetting. Another explanation could be that efficient learners employ more effective learning strategies, like using a keyword to relate the two words in a pair.
This study’s findings raise the question of whether learning efficiency is specific to certain skills like learning word pairs, or if it’s a more general measure of learning capacity. Future research on learning efficiency has implications for educational and clinical settings, such as teaching students to be efficient learners and mitigating the cognitive effects of disease, aging and neuropsychological disorders.
Washington University co-authors include: Andrew Fishell, a doctoral student at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the School of Medicine; Steven Nelson and Neil Savalia (former psychological & brain sciences postdoctoral fellow and student, respectively); and former psychological & brain sciences research technician Jeffrey Berg.
This research was funded in part by grants from the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Dart NeuroScience.
Zerr, C. L., Berg, J. J., Nelson, S. M., Fishell, A. K., Savalia, N. K., & McDermott, K. B. (2018). Learning efficiency: Identifying individual differences in learning rate and retention in healthy adults. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797618772540
A memorial service in honor of Zishan (Simoner) Zhao will take place at 11 a.m. Sept. 22 in Brown Hall Lounge. A reception will follow at 12:15 p.m. in Brown Hall.
Zhao, a rising junior in the College of Arts & Sciences, died June 2 of injuries after being hit by a car while attempting to cross a street in Wilmington, N.C. He was 19. He was from the Guangdong, Longgang, District in Shenzhen, China, and was majoring in biochemistry in the Department of Biology, with a minor in writing.
Patient care. Informed consent. Genetics and transplantation.
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a thrilling adventure but also a prescient guidebook to the moral and ethical dilemmas of 20th and 21st century medicine.
This month, Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Medicine and College of Arts & Sciences will present “The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein,” a three-day forum that explores Shelley’s novel through the lens of medical research, education and practice.
“Victor Frankenstein succeeds in conquering death,” said Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian and co-founder of the Program in Medical Humanities, both in Arts & Sciences. “He creates an extra-human being, one that is stronger, faster, more agile, and whose parts are in themselves more beautiful and proportional than any natural man’s.
“Yet Frankenstein never contemplates the possible consequences of the composite being he brings to life,” Messbarger continued. “He never truly considers the human impact of his experiments. To know more, to be the first, to surpass all before him in this achievement and revel in the glory — these are what drive him.
“By the novel’s end, Frankenstein has been destroyed by the terrible consequences of his ambition,” Messbarger added. “His grief at the loss of his own soul is a parable for the modern age about the destructive force of science divorced from humanity.
“As romantics like Mary Shelley warned, there is no triumph in it,” Messbarger concluded. “Humanity must be at the center of science.”
‘The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein’
“The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein” is presented as part of Washington University’s ongoing Frankenstein Bicentennial, which celebrates the 200th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
Luke Dittrich
The forum will begin Friday, Sept. 28, with celebrated science writer Luke Dittrich, who will discuss “Shelley’s Frankenstein and modern medical practice: A family story of lobotomy.” (While in St. Louis, Dittrich also will discuss his book, “Patient H.M.: A story of memory, madness and family secrets,” for the university’s Assembly Series.)
The forum will continue Saturday, Sept. 29, with William Newman, historian of science at Indiana University, who will explore “Frankenstein, the homunculus, and the long history of artificial life.” On Sunday, Sept. 30, Amy Pawl, senior lecturer in English in Arts & Sciences, will argue that “We must save Frankenstein’s monster,” while Minsoo Kang, historian at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, will make the case that “We must kill Frankenstein.”
Prior to each lecture, students and faculty from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will stage a scene from Nick Dear’s theatrical adaptation of “Frankenstein.” Following each will be a panel discussion with leading biomedical ethicists, medical educators and practitioners, artists, humanists and university administrators on Frankenstein’s relevance to medical practice today.
All events take place in the School of Medicine’s Clopton Auditorium, located in the lower level of Wohl Clinic, 4950 Children’s Place. The forum is free and open to the public but space is limited and RSVPs are required. For a complete schedule and list of participants, visit the Frankenstein Bicentennial webpage.
Sponsors
“The Curren(t)cy of Frankenstein” is sponsored by the Center for History of Medicine; the School of Medicine; Office of the Provost; the Bernard Becker Medical Library; the Program in Medical Humanities; the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences; the Office of Faculty Affairs; the Department of Developmental Biology; the Medical Staff Association of Barnes-Jewish Hospital; and the Arts & Sciences Connections Series.
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports gets to the bottom of it: Why do dogs that are trained to locate poop sometimes find the wrong kind of poop?
It happens anywhere from 4 percent to 45 percent of the time, said Karen DeMatteo, a biologist in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Her new research confirms that there are three viable, alternative explanations beyond errors in handler or dog training that can explain the collection of non-target scats with detection dogs in some ecosystems.
Detection dogs are trained to use scent, not their eyes, to locate specific kinds of scat. They’re useful partners in conservation projects as an alternative to camera photo traps or other more invasive means of identifying which individual animals are present in an area.
And while finding the wrong kind of poop doesn’t ultimately muck up research results — researchers who use scat to track animals usually use DNA tests to confirm the identity of target and non-target evacuators — collecting and testing false positives costs a project time and resources.
“To date, when non-target samples are found in detection dog studies, it is assumed it may be due to errors in detection dog or handler training; however, our study determined that this is not always the case,” DeMatteo said. “Instead, the complexity of ecosystems where a study is conducted can affect the perceived accuracy of detection dog studies because the natural behaviors of non-target species, like coyotes in our study, can alter the genetic profile of target scat, like that from a puma.”
Detection dogs are great at determining the presence of specific animals because they can find droppings hidden in grass, droppings that have been rained on and disintegrated into the mud — or even droppings that have been eaten and then recycled.
Yes, that’s right, and it’s a normal part of life for many animals, DeMatteo said.
“Humans have a natural aversion to coprophagy, which is reflected in the visual horror on an owner’s face when they see their dog gobble down their own scat or the scat of another dog or cat,” DeMatteo said. “Once this shock subsides, the owner typically worries that the scat will cause health problems or there is something psychologically wrong with their four-legged friend.”
“While the reasons underlying coprophagy in domestic dogs are still fuzzy, it is known in wild canids that coprophagy is natural and is often associated with territoriality or nutritional benefits,” she said. “So while the finding that coyotes will consume puma scat is novel and has various ecological implications, coprophagy occurs naturally under a variety of circumstances.”
The tendency of one animal to eat another’s scat is one of three behaviors that might alter the type of scat, or the state of the scat, that a detector dog might encounter, and thus affect the perceived accuracy of the technique.
Researchers also considered how urine-marking by non-target species might affect a detector dog’s ability to locate scat from a species of interest, and also what happens if one animal picks up another’s scat and moves it using its mouth, potentially bringing it into contact with saliva. Field trials were conducted in the St. Louis area and in northwest Nebraska.
The researchers found that each of the proposed behaviors alters the genetic profile of the scat in question, and all were confirmed to play a role in the detection dog indicating on non-target scats.
The pool of conservation-trained detection dogs is constantly growing in number, as are the types of target species and the areas where they are being used, DeMatteo said. One of the continuing questions surrounding their use for these types of projects is how to maintain a high quality standard for training detection dogs and their handlers.
“In reality, the dog is easier to train then the handler, with the latter having a higher chance of introducing error,” DeMatteo said. “Even with these variables, these results are extendable to other dog-handler teams with less experience, as long as consistency is used.”
“Genetic testing can eliminate these samples and maintain accuracy in the [detection dog-assisted] studies,” DeMatteo said. “However, this non-target interaction with target scat potentially has important implications for other ecological questions, including parasite/disease transmission, zoonotic diseases and general health of wild populations.”
Anyone who peruses relationship settings on social media knows that our interactions with other humans can be intricate, but a new study in Nature: Scientific Reports suggests that researchers may be overlooking some of these same complexities in the social relations of our closest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees and macaques.
“Our study confirms that the social relationships of nonhuman primates are extremely complicated, nuanced and multi-faceted,” said Jake Funkhouser, lead author of the study and an anthropology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Funkhouser
“It also suggests that existing research techniques for observing and measuring dominance are missing components of complexity that are critical for understanding the layers of diverse social relationships we see in the animal kingdom, our own human societies included,” Funkhouser said.
Primatologists, such as Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas and Dian Fossey, have been studying primate behavior for decades, so the idea that chimpanzees and other primates have complex social relationships is nothing new.
While Funkhouser and colleagues affirm the importance of understanding these relationships, they argue that many long-established methodologies for assessing primate power struggles — observations of fighting over food or mates — may be too one-dimensional to capture the very complex social dynamics of primate relationships.
Adult female chimpanzees Missy (age 41) and Annie (age 42) share strong affiliative bonds at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Cle Elum, Wash. (Photo: Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest)
“The social relationships humans share with others cannot be accurately represented in simply ‘dominant’ or ‘subordinate’ terms,” Funkhouser said. “Nor do our relationships readily transfer between settings; the aggressive or confrontational interactions we engage in with some are much different than the prosocial interactions we share with our spouse and best friends.
“Primate social relationships also are highly individualized and dependent on the partners involved and the social setting in which the interaction takes place. As the primate species with the most complex sociality, we humans should understand this pretty well,” he said.
An adult female chimpanzee, Jamie (age 38), maintains her high dominance rank through frequent aggressive interactions at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Cle Elum, Wash. (Photo: Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest)
Across the animal kingdom, the term “social dominance” has been widely used as a descriptive shorthand to convey the behavioral characteristics and power status of individual animals and simplify the overall structure of social relationships within groups. However, investigators often differ in their definitions of dominance, the methods used to derive dominance and the statistical techniques used to rank individuals in a group. “This is precisely the problem we set out to explore,” Funkhouser said.
In this study, Funkhouser and colleagues captured detailed behavioral data from the observation of captive chimpanzees at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Cle Elum, Wash., and of wild Tibetan macaques of Mt. Huangshan in the Anhui Province of China.
By running these same behavioral data sets through a series of 69 different statistical analyses, they were able to compare and contrast how various methodologies ranked individuals’ status and how these structures of dominance predicted patterns of other social behavior within the groups.
“When distilled, this paper simply highlights something intuitive about what being dominant means for a social animal: that social context matters,” said co-author Jessica A. Mayhew, director of the Primate Behavior and Ecology program and assistant professor of anthropology and museum studies at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash.
Mayhew
“The perception that dominance is solely about aggression, in other words who ‘wins’ and who ‘loses’ a contest, is only one piece of the larger group social dynamics,” Mayhew said. “It’s critical that as researchers we continue to acknowledge the context in which we collect our data because it influences our interpretation.”
To exemplify this, at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, this study found that Jamie, an adult female chimpanzee who was retired from biomedical research, directs a lot of aggression toward the other chimpanzees. Therefore, through a competitive lens, Jamie is calculated to be the most dominant.
However, Negra — an older adult female chimpanzee who was captured in the wild as an infant, used in biomedical research and then retired — rarely engages in aggressive interactions but is most frequently the recipient of the groups’ grooming efforts.
In Negra’s case, she was calculated to be most dominant via the occupation of a privileged, or “respected,” role in the group. These different results correspond with observations of chimpanzees’ extremely complex and fluid social systems in the wild.
On the other hand, wild Tibetan macaques are often observed to have much stricter social rules, and this study picked up on those trends as well. These macaques follow species-typical trends and maintain one, mostly generalizable, dominance hierarchy that is stable across social contexts.
For example, young adult males TouGui and YeRongBing along with GouShan, a much older male, occupy the top of the dominance hierarchy, while females YeZhen, TouRongYu and TouTai occupy the bottom of the hierarchy.
Wild juvenile Tibetan macaques, HuaXiaWei and TouRongXi, engage in affiliative grooming to forge and maintain social bonds at the Valley of the Wild Monkeys in Mt. Huangshan in the Anhui Province of China. (Photo: Jessica Mayhew)
Funkhouser, who studied primate behavior under Mayhew while pursuing his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Central Washington University, is conducting his doctoral research under the supervision of Crickette Sanz, an associate professor of physical anthropology at Washington University.
Sanz is a leading scholar of primate behavior and co-principal investigator of the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project in the northern Republic of Congo.
In Funkhouser’s doctoral work, he and Sanz plan to continue asking questions of behavioral adaptations, comparative social behavior and individual welfare of chimpanzee populations living in the wild, zoos and sanctuaries.
“Power dynamics among primates can have life or death outcomes; being an alpha can mean that a primate has access to higher quality food or more mates. The study of animal social relationships has been transformed over the past decade by a suite of new methods and analytical tools,” Sanz said. “This study shows how these tools can be used to better understand social relationships among chimpanzees and macaques, two species with reputations for being highly political.”
How do borders shape our lives? What powers enforce them? When, where and why are boundaries transgressed?
Over the past four years, The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, has supported dozens of classes, seminars and research projects investigating the history, mechanisms and contemporary effects of spatial segregation.
This fall, the university will launch a second phase, The Divided City 2022, thanks to a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“The focus on segregation, which both anchored and animated the first four years of the Divided City Initiative, is no less pertinent than it was in 2014,” said Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, who serves as co-principal investigator with Bruce Lindsey, E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Allman noted that the original Divided City initiative received Mellon funding just months before the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “The Ferguson uprising profoundly shaped the work, the priorities and the collaborative energy of The Divided City and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” she said.
“Our original intent was to explore how segregation, in its broadest sense, plays out in cities, buildings, neighborhoods, public spaces and other urban landscapes,” Lindsey said. “Ferguson and all it has come to symbolize — the sustained activism, the militarized police response — has profoundly shaped our work, and brought these issues into razor-sharp focus.
“But these problems are not unique to St. Louis,” Lindsey added. “Segregation, inequality, the urban divide — these are global concerns.”
Pipelines, bridges and collaboration
With The Divided City 2022, Allman and Lindsey aim to further scholarship on the urban humanities while also building long-term institutional stability.
Priorities include: 1) developing more diverse pipelines into architecture and design; 2) building curricular bridges between these fields and the humanities; and 3) fostering collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches to the study of segregation.
New initiatives will include: an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate in the urban humanities; an annual Informal Cities Workshop; two new urban humanities courses — “Building a Garden” and “History, Society, and Landscape Urbanism” —offered as part of the Washington University Prison Education Project; and the Divided City Ampersand Program, a series of undergraduate seminars focusing on segregation.
The Divided City 2022 also will extend the Center for the Humanities’ “studiolab” pilot program to include a program in the urban humanities. (Inspired by studio and laboratory collaborations, studiolabs are close-knit communities of faculty and students, based at the Lewis Center in University City, focusing on a particular theme or problem for a period of one year.)
In addition, The Divided City 2022 will continue funding for the City Seminar, which invites regional and international scholars to share ideas about urban issues.
Grants and fellowships
Support also will continue for the Divided City Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowships. Intended to forge interdisciplinary connections, the two-month fellowships are open to graduate students in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture.
In addition, The Divided City 2022 will continue support for the Sam Fox School’s Alberti Program. Sponsored in partnership with PGAV Destinations, the Alberti Program is a free architecture workshop for St. Louis students ages 8–16. The Divided City will offer support for graduate coordinators, who will help develop new curricula exploring intersections between design and the humanities.
Also continuing will be the faculty collaborative grants, which support projects involving the humanities and at least one other discipline. Awards of up to $20,000 may be used to support research relating to urban segregation/separation, field work in non-U.S. contexts, and projects that strengthen connections between the university and the St. Louis community.
In addition to Mellon funding, The Divided City 2022 is supported by: the Office of the Provost; the College of Arts & Sciences; the Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture.
The Center for the Humanities will host an official launch event at the City Museum Oct. 22. For more information, contact the Center for the Humanities or visit thedividedcity.com.
In “Persistence of Memory,” choreographer Ting-Ting Chang explores the convergence of dance and painting through works inspired by the art of Salvador Dali and the writings of Sigmund Freud.
At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 26, Chang and her company, T.T.C. Dance, will present the evening-length piece in Edison Theatre at Washington University in St. Louis, an event sponsored by the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences.
Chang, a former Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow in dance in the PAD, has presented her work on stages around the world, including at the Kuala Lumpur International Arts Festival, China’s Silk Road International Arts Festival and the Shanghai Dance Stage International Festival. With T.T.C. Dance, which she established in Taipei in 2012, Chang seeks to return to the essence of dance, focusing on the body and re-imagining its possibilities through “dynamic visual spectacles that are equally entertaining and inspiring.”
Edison Theatre is in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. Tickets to “Persistence of Memory” are $10, or free for Washington University students, and are available at the Edison Theatre Box Office. For more information, call 314-935-6543 or visit edison.wustl.edu.
Nobel laureate Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, will deliver the 2018 Weissman Lecture Oct. 4 at Washington University in St. Louis.
The lecture, titled “Engines Through the Ages,” will begin at 4 p.m. in Graham Chapel on the Danforth Campus, followed by a question-and-answer session from 5:15 -6:15 p.m. Sponsored by the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public.
“Engines Through the Ages” will journey into the mechanical innovations realized during the early and mid-20th century, followed by discussions revolving around a new type of bonding in molecules consisting of mechanical linkages pioneered by Stoddart and fellow Nobel laureate Jean-Pierre Sauvage, which they used to control large amplitude motions in nanoscale mechanically interlocked molecules — such as catenanes and rotaxanes.
A new type of bonding: Since there is no covalent bond between the rings and threads that make up catenane (above) or rotaxane (below) molecules, their linkage is called a mechanical bond. (Image: Stoddart’s Nobel Lecture)
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, during World War II, Stoddart learned the value of hard work growing up on Edgelaw Farm, about a dozen miles south of Edinburgh. From there, he attended the University of Edinburgh, where he attained BSc (1964) and PhD (1966) degrees in chemistry. He also was awarded a DSc degree by Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule.
Stoddart’s varied academic career has brought him from the United Kingdom to Canada to Los Angeles. Most recently, he joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 2008, where his primary research group resides, although he now holds a part-time appointment at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
In honoring Stoddart with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2016, the committee noted: “We can imagine that the components of the smallest machines could be molecules. For a machine to function, its parts must be able to move relative to each other. Fraser Stoddart has contributed to the development of molecular machines, for example by developing a ‘rotaxane’ in 1991. A ring-shaped molecule was threaded over another molecule that functions like an axle. In the future, molecular machines could be used for new materials, sensors, and energy storage systems.”
In a profile of Stoddart and his co-prize recipients for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jonathan Barnes, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, and co-author Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University wrote, “At the very least, these men introduced a fundamentally new way of constructing molecular matter at the nanoscale, and at the very most they laid the groundwork for a new field focused on using such capabilities to realize complex interlocked molecules with extraordinary functions we typically equate with macroscopic machinery.”
About the Weissman Lecture
The lecture honors Samuel I. Weissman, a Washington University faculty member from 1946 until his death in 2007. Weissman was recruited to Los Alamos in 1943, where he worked on the atomic bomb, an accomplishment about which he was later deeply ambivalent.
In 1946, Weissman joined the Washington University faculty with five of his Los Alamos colleagues, who together formed the core of the modern chemistry department. Here, he soon turned to the brand-new field of magnetic resonance, in which he was to become a renowned pioneer and world-class expert. A scientist to the core, Weissman did creative research until virtually his last days at the age of 95. Weissman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frankel’s new paper, 
