Ampersand Magazine

News, milestones, and spotlights from across Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
 

• Off to Oxford
  Tori Harwell recently became WashU’s 30th Rhodes Scholar, a prestigious honor that allows students the opportunity to earn an advanced degree at Oxford University.

• Optimizing the ‘omics’
  Gary Patti will soon co-manage a new multi-omics production center set to analyze materials from six disease study sites across the country. 

• Not-so-spooky sounds
  WashU researchers working with the St. Louis Wildlife Project are using a new method to identify urban bats.

• Green energy guru
  Doctoral student Ashlynn Berry was one of just 60 graduate students selected by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to participate in a graduate student research fellowship. 

• You don’t know yak
  An international team of researchers including Xinyi Liu and Fiona Marshall used ancient DNA and archaeology to trace the origins of domestic yak back 2,500 years.
   

• Training investigators in AI
  The National Science Foundation is investing $3 million over the next five years in WashU’s AI-ACCESS research traineeship program.

• A moral minefield
  Erin McGlothlin won the 2023 Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize for “The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction.”

• Welcoming a prize-winning poet
  Eduardo C. Corral will join the English department this fall, adding to the MFA program’s roster of award-winning faculty.

• What’s in a name?
  Research by Ariela Schachter found that many online housing listings reflect implicit biases about neighborhoods based on racial and socioeconomic factors.

• Where the wild viruses are
  A grant from the National Institutes of Health will allow Krista Milich, Michael Landis, and David Wang to model viral transmission dynamics among red colobus monkeys and their human neighbors.

• Roots of diversity
  A study involving 43 research plots — including a swath of trees at WashU’s Tyson Research Center — fueled a global investigation into the power of underground fungi to shape forests.

• Symbolic speech
  Matthew Hayes found Black legislators talk about race and civil rights more than their white colleagues and they often rely on powerful symbolism to connect with constituents.