Rob Wild, associate vice chancellor for students, has no preconceived notions about what Washington University’s proposed diversity center should be. That’s for students, faculty and staff to decide. But he does know this — it must serve everyone.

“This cannot be a place just for some of our students,” Wild said. “Historically, there have been a lot of multicultural centers that focus on underrepresented populations, whether that’s African-American students or Latino students. But I want there to be reasons for 100 percent of students to come here.”

Wild and junior Seiko Shastri are leading a committee to develop a university center for diversity and inclusion. They invite all community members to two town hall meetings to discuss the center’s mission, location and name. The first meeting is at 8 p.m. tonight, Sept. 25, in WIlson Hall, Room 214; the next meeting is 8 p.m. Oct. 24 in Seigle Hall, Room L006.

“We already have a lot of great resources on campus, but how can we bring all of that together to create a place that offers great education and programs and also provides a source of support for students with intersecting identities," Shastri said. “Developing a center -- a physical presence of campus — really demonstrates that our institution is truly committed. And many of the students I talk to also agree this is a great need on our campus.”

The center for diversity and inclusion is one of eight initiatives sponsored by the Mosaic Project, the campuswide program devoted to strengthening diversity on campus. The project was created in response to a racially charged episode in the Bear’s Den last year. Vice Chancellor for Students Sharon Stahl still is pained by the memory of the incident, but said it awakened her to the stubborn challenges that continue to confront the university.

“We all wanted to think that was an aberration, but since it has happened, I’ve had a lot of students come up to me and tell me about times that they have felt marginalized or unsupported,” Stahl said. “That has helped me understand we have a lot of work to do. Because we are a majority white, privileged community, most of us never encounter these things, but there are members of our community who do encounter them. So how do you create a safe place place where we can have those difficult conversations?”

Stahl hopes the center creates not only more mindful students, but more mindful doctors, teachers and city council members as well.

“Often when we do things that are hurtful it’s because we’re unaware, but intention doesn’t lessen impact,” Stahl said. “And so we really do need to learn about one another. Everyone who is here is going to go out into the world and play a role of leadership. And to do that well you must respect and understand the people around you.”

The center is just the start. Other Mosaic Project working groups include a Policies and Procedures Committee that has cataloged the university’s policies regarding inappropriate behavior and is identifying possible inconsistencies; a Social Media Committee that will develop ways to encourage civil online discourse and a Bias Response System Committee that will launch in January a website where students can report incidents of bias.

Stahl also has hired Jessica Wilen (AB '06, MSW '07) to serve as Mosaic Project coordinator. Wilen is a clinical therapist who most recently worked with sexual-assault survivors and offenders. She also is young and white. In other words, she is a lot like many students here.

Mosaic Project Coordinator Jessica Wilen

“We tend to think of diversity as a niche issue. It’s not,” Wilen said. “One of the most important questions for us is how to reach the whole congregation, not just the choir.”

Wilen recently published her first monthly online update and hosts open office hours at 3 p.m. Tuesdays at the Danforth University Center. She also has been meeting with student groups and staff members, basically anyone who wants to ask questions or offer input. Her goal is to make the Mosaic Project transparent and action-oriented.

“Students were concerned this was a reactive response — an incident happened and the university needed to respond,” Wilen said. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to acknowledge what happened but to move forward, to recognize that conversations about identity extend beyond race. We want to widen the lens and accomplish some very tangible goals so that our campus culture is as inclusive as possible. From a personal perspective, this is incredibly important to me. I want everyone to have the same wonderful experience I had as a student here.”

Center for Diversity and Inclusion Town Hall Meeting

When: 8-9 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25

Where: Wilson Hall, Room 214

More information: http://diversity.wustl.edu/students/mosaic/

Carter Lewis at the first roundtable reading of The Impossible Adventures of Supernova Jones. Written by 2013 alumnus Aaron Senser, the play is one of three featured in this year's A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival, which takes place Sept. 27 and 28. Photos by Jerry Naunheim Jr./WUSTL Photo Services

Much of the credit goes to Carter W. Lewis, the PAD’s playwright-in-residence. A two-time nominee for the American Theatre Critics Award, Lewis is author of more than 20 full-length plays and has received over 150 productions from companies around the nation.

This week, Lewis and visiting dramaturg Marge Betley will lead the PAD’s annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival. Named for alumnus A.E. Hotchner (who famously bested Tennessee Williams in a campus playwriting competition), the festival will feature staged readings of three promising new works.

We sat down with Lewis to discuss the Hotchner Festival, new play development and the difficulties of letting go.

What’s the difference between writing drama and writing prose?

In some ways, that’s the biggest hurdle. It’s the difference between dialogue and narrative. Sometimes writers have great tools, great verbal acumen, but they fail at playwriting because they want to shape the story with descriptive narrative. They want someone to speak their beautiful language out loud. But that’s not a play.

So what is a play?

A play is based in behavior — it's not just spoken prose. I always ask students, is a play more like a book or a symphony? And the answer is, it’s more like a symphony. Because even though it might take the form of a book, a play is really a blueprint that other artists bring to fruition. It’s a collaborative artform.

Aaron Senser listens to the first workshop reading of his play. In the foreground is director Annamaria Pileggi, professor of the practice in drama.

Yeah, there is, but it's different for each play. Sometimes it’s very fast and clean — you know the journey of the characters and the play just writes itself. I finished Evie’s Waltz in three weeks. And sometimes you get stuck and everything feels like a mess.

How do you explain the difference?

I don't know! Sometimes the magic is there and sometimes it's not. [Laughs.] I have a big file of things I’ve thrown away.

But you go back to the toolbox. What drives a play? It’s the wants and desires of the main characters. If they don't want something specific enough, and they don't want it badly enough, the play doesn't have a motor.

You might start out with an idea: poverty, say, or the destruction of the middle class. But if you don’t embed it in your characters, if you don’t give them a strong or specific-enough want, then the play just muddles along. You have a concept but no place to go.

What’s your own process like? How do you begin a new play?

When I start a play, I'm always in great danger because I don't have a well-defined arc or journey in mind. I start with a couple of characters in a situation. I don't know where I'm going, I don't know where they've been, but I try to work it out on paper.

People think writers all have book-lined walls and children who’ve read Catcher in the Rye by age 4. But I know a lot of writers, and most of them hate what they write each day. They’re tortured, they’re frustrated, they think it's never going to be produced. So if a student is struggling, if it feels difficult — that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means that you’re a writer.

Visiting dramaturg Marge Betley with festival assistant Rachel Blumer.

Well, the deadline for submissions is always some time in January. I then distill a group of 8-12 plays and send them to an adjudication committee, which selects three for development. In the spring, I do some dramaturgical work with the playwrights — what’s working, what’s not — and they do rewrites over the summer. In the fall, we send new drafts to our visiting dramaturg and start working with the directors and talking about casting.

And then we start rehearsals. We sit around the table, read it out loud and talk about it. But it’s a playwright-driven process. The playwright decides what we do day-to-day based on what the play needs at this point in its development. We might work on one scene, or do a complete run-through. The playwright can continue revising and editing right up until the public reading.

Describe that first reading around the table. What does a playwright learn from hearing the words spoken?

It's terribly frightening. I remember one former student banging his head on the table. “Why don't my characters just shut up?” But it also can be exhilarating. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know, in the early stages, it’s supposed to be less than perfect, or even downright awful. As playwrights, we start by making messes, and then we go about cleaning them up.

In the beginning especially, that must feel very daunting — like the whole show lives or dies by your words alone.

I think that’s right. But once you see it on stage, you realize that it’s not only about you. It’s also about the work of all your collaborators — all the people who have generously given of their time, effort and talent.

The typical metaphor is giving birth to children. You raise them for five or six years, but then you have to start giving them away — to daycare or babysitters, to educational institutions, to spouses and the larger community.

In a production, the playwright begins as Lord God. But by halfway through you’re just a sidekick, and by the time it finally opens you’re getting everyone else coffee.

Senior Micajah Dudley reads a part from The Impossible Adventures of Supernova Jones.

All readings are free and open to the public and take place in The A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd.

For more information, call (314) 935-5858, visit pad.artsci.wustl.edu or follow us on Facebook.

Simmons

Her talk, “The State of Conscience in University Life Today,” addresses the importance of the liberal arts in higher education, a principle the late, beloved WUSTL teacher and administrator Jim McLeod held dear.

Co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities, Office of the Provost, and the College of Arts & Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Apropos to Jim McLeod’s belief in the power of individual stories, Simmons’ is remarkable and inspiring. The 12th child of Texas sharecroppers, she embarked on an educational journey that led to a doctoral degree in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University and launched her long and distinguished career.

She has held a number of faculty and administrative appointments in some of the leading educational institutions in the country, including the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Spelman College and Smith College.

As president of Smith, Simmons established important initiatives such as an engineering program for the women's college.

As president of Brown University from 2001 to 2012, Simmons became the first African American to hold the highest post at an Ivy League institution. She continues to teach comparative literature and Africana studies at Brown.

Because of Simmons’ leadership on major public policies affecting higher education, she has been a featured speaker at the White House, the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution, and the Clinton Global Initiative. She is the recipient of many honors and holds membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations.

McLeod, who came to Washington University in 1974, served as vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences until his death in 2011. He is widely considered one of the university’s greatest leaders whose impact will be felt for generations.

For more information on this and other Assembly Series programs, visit here or call (314) 935-4620. For more information on Center for the Humanities events, visit here. 

Students at a school in Nepal show off banks as part of that country's YouthSave program in that country.

Low-income youth in developing countries will save their money in a formal account when given the right opportunity.

That’s a key point in a groundbreaking study, led by Lissa Johnson, director of administration for the Center for Social Development (CSD). She shared the findings at the YouthSave Learning and Exchange Event in Washington, D.C., this month. CSD is a research center in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

YouthSave, a five-year study supported by The MasterCard Foundation, investigates the potential of savings accounts as a tool for youth development and financial inclusion in four developing countries. In partnership with Save the Children, financial institutions in each country launched YouthSave accounts early in 2012 and marketed the accounts primarily to low-income youth ages 12-18.

Across the countries of Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal, more than 10,000 youth participating in the YouthSave study saved $519,127 over an average of six months.

“At this early stage, it’s not as much about the amount they have saved as it is that they are opening these accounts,” Johnson said. “I think the demand is there. The key is to get financial institutions to offer quality, affordable products and services that are both attractive and accessible to youth.”

Johnson and a YouthSave team, including research partners in each country, recently published first-year findings in a CSD research report titled “Savings Patterns and Performance in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal.” This report was a central topic of discussion when project partners convened in Washington, D.C., Sept. 13-14 to discuss outcomes, challenges and strategies of the initiative.

The youth who have opened YouthSave accounts include girls and boys and come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many are from low-income families, with some from households that previously were unbanked. Through this opportunity, the youth are beginning to move themselves and their families toward greater financial inclusion.

Researchers are finding that “taking the bank to the youth” is effective, Johnson said. Financial institutions in Ghana and Nepal offer financial capability activities – which include financial education, account enrollment and depository services – at schools. The association of participation in these activities with account uptake is positive and significant.

In Kenya, the financial institution also offers opportunities for youth to open savings accounts at schools. Based in part on these successes, the financial institution in Colombia is now visiting schools with Save the Children to provide similar services.

“We often talk about the importance of providing financial education to young people, but what has frequently been left out of the equation is the opportunity to actively use their knowledge and skills safely and productively through mainstream financial institutions," Johnson said. "The experience, of course, is its own form of financial education. These youth are getting that opportunity through the savings accounts, and they are responding to it.”

The savings data will be linked to an experiment in Ghana that will test the impact of YouthSave accounts on youth developmental outcomes, including academic achievement, health, future orientation and expectations, and financial capability.

Johnson said the conference in Washington, D.C., emphasized the fact that many questions remain about youth savings in developing countries. “This data gives us some answers, but those answers lead to more questions,” she said.

The team will continue to track savings activity and characteristics associated with savings performance over the final two years of the study. Using other research methods, such as case studies, the Ghana experiment, and other experiments in Colombia and Kenya, the group expects to learn a lot more about who opens accounts, what product and service features promote savings, and the impact of savings on youth development.

The YouthSave study will run through 2015 and is led by Michael Sherraden, PhD, CSD Director and Benjamin E. Youngdahl professor at the Brown School.

To read the full report, visit here.

This is the first in a series of articles that describe how scholars at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing their varied skills to bear on the issue of climate change and global warming.

Wikimedia Commons

In this famous image from Très Riches Heures, a book of prayers to be said at canonical hours made for the Duc de Berry between 1412 and 1416, a peasant plows the fields in March, early even for France. The book was created toward the end of the Medieval Warm Period, five centuries of warm, settled weather in Europe. What is the relation between the climate and the settlement of Greenland, the Crusades or even the building of cathedrals? Until recently, these weren’t even “historical” questions.

In the past few years, there has been a noticeable shift in the way people talk about climate change at social events. The argument over the physical science is effectively over; people accept the reality of global warming and would prefer not to debate it anymore. 

Instead, they’d like to move the conversation on, although they’re often not sure just where they want it to go. Yes, there is climate change . . .  and then what?

An innovative course at Washington University in St. Louis offers a way forward by making available the efforts of historians to integrate natural history and human history over the past 40 years. 

Taught by Venus Bivar, PhD, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences, it is an introduction to a discipline called environmental history, with a special focus on climate change.

Bivar’s reading list is an immediate tipoff that this is not just a run-through of climate science. The list includes The Long Thaw, by David Archer, a geophysicist, but that is probably the only text that might be assigned in a science course.

Archer makes a crucial point, however: global warming is not a short-term problem we can simply outwait. It will take hundreds of thousands of years for rock weathering to draw down the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere, he says.

Courtesy photo

Bivar outside the castle in the city of Angers in northwestern France. Bivar, whose dissertation was about the industrialization of agriculture in France in the 20th century, was in Angers to do research in the archives there.

“Topics in Environmental History: Climate” has two parts, explainedBivar, who plans to teach the course again in the fall of 2015. The first part is an introduction to environmental history and the second consists of readings on global warming to which the class is asked to respond in the light of environmental history.

Environmental history emerged as a sub-discipline in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a general cultural reassessment and a growing awareness of the scope of environmental problems. It was in large part a reaction to the idea that history is the story of the rise of civilization that is marked by continual economic growth and ever-increasing technological mastery.

William Cronon, one of the founders of the field, says that environmental historians are “trying to write histories as much for the earth and the rest of creation as they do for the human past.” 

Arthur Rothstein/Wikimedia Commons

A farmer and his sons take shelter from a dust storm in Oklahoma in 1936. People have told the story of the Dust Bowl in surprisingly different ways.

“We cannot escape the challenge of multiple competing narratives in our efforts to understand both nature and the human past,” Cronon said.

Just realizing that the Dust Bowl story has been told in so many different ways helps us to escape the grip of ghost narratives: old narratives that continue to structure our thinking without our being fully aware of their influence.

In another destabilizing essay, Bivar quotes a French writer on climate change: “We are plagued by drought and science says, we must not accuse nature but man who, by altering the surface of the earth has changed the course of the atmosphere and then the influence of the seasons.”

But this sentence was penned in 1800, at a time when there was widespread alarm about the degradation of forests and the effects that was having on climate. 

According to historians Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, people were even entertaining climate-engineering schemes at the time, such as planting large stands of eucalyptus trees that would purify the air and banish ‘miasmas.’

How startling to realize that climate change was a preoccupation of post-Revolutionary France! Locher and Fressoz echo Cronon, saying that “the dominant narratives used to reflect upon the contemporary environmental crisis are too simple” — as demonstrated by our tendency to think our concerns about climate are unprecedented.

 

But the foundational text of environmental history Bivar most enjoyed teaching was The Columbian Exchange, Alfred Crosby’s account of the ecological impact of Columbus’ landing in 1492 on both the New and Old Worlds.

Crosby argued that Europeans dominated the Americans not because of their superior military technology but because they brought with them diseases that swept the country before them, leaving it depopulated and vulnerable.

“When you teach The Columbian Exchange today, students say they already know all this,” she says. But just 40 years ago, Crosby had difficulty finding a publisher for his book and actually gave up looking for a time. 

“It’s fun to teach to remind students how quickly you internalize these intellectual arguments as popular knowledge,” Bivar said. “It took just a few decades for an argument that was so groundbreaking that nobody wanted to touch it to become part of the vernacular.”

And what about climate change?

Her reading selections for the latter half of the course are as interesting and as original. “I chose climate change as a focus for the second half because it is a hot-button issue today, but also because it’s where a lot of the more interesting work is being done,” she says.

 

 

 

One of her selections was In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, by Mark Carey, an account of glacial lake outburst floods that killed 25,000 people in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in north-central Peru in the second half of the 20th century.

To a reader worried about global warming, the response of local communities to the catastrophes caused by melting mountain glaciers may be discouraging. Even when glacier disasters destroyed their communities, Carey says, urban residents rebuilt in potential flood and avalanche paths, sometimes with fatal consequences. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand what might happen: instead they felt that the national government should drain the glacial lakes rather than restrict where they could live through hazard zoning.

“Carey’s book is a good example of the importance of thinking about the interaction between people and the environment instead of just about the environment as a closed ‘natural’ system,” Bivar said.

“Adaptation to glacier retreat and climate change hinges as much on culture, technological innovation, politics, economics and social relations as it does on science and environmental change — even though societies prioritize science rather than society in their analysis of climate change,” Carey wrote.

By bringing nature into their accounts of human history, historians are preparing the way for a more adequate response to global warming. “The mistaken assumptions and romantic myths that many people bring not just to history but to nature create endless distortions and misreadings,” Cronon wrote. People can only see what they have learned to see.

 

And as Carey implied, it is dangerous for the rest of us to rely on scientists to rescue us. Geophysicist Archer, after all, is at his least credible when he envisions a future with solar arrays on the moon and windmills in the jet stream.

At the end of the course, Bivar does something a bit mischievous. She assigns The Windup Girl, a science fiction novel set in 23rd-century Thailand after fossil fuels have been depleted and biotechnology companies have replaced all seeds with genetically engineered ones that are sterile. 

The book is a challenge to her students: Having learned about environmental history, she is asking, can you imagine your way out of this trap?

​Girls who regularly eat peanut butter or nuts could be 39 percent less likely to develop benign breast disease by age 30, according to a new study.

The carotid arteries, shown above, feed blood to the brain. Doctors at Washington University are testing an investigational device designed to open blocked carotid arteries in patients whose age or poor health makes them ineligible for the traditional open surgery.

Doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are investigating a minimally invasive procedure to open blocked carotid arteries in patients whose poor health or advanced age makes the traditional open surgery too risky.

The clinical study, taking place at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, is part of a global, multicenter trial evaluating the safety and effectiveness of a new technique and device designed for high-risk patients with carotid artery disease, a condition that restricts blood flow to the brain and increases the risk of stroke.

The two carotid arteries of the neck that supply blood to the brain can become clogged with plaque in the same way that arteries in the heart can become blocked. More than 300,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with carotid artery blockages every year. Left untreated, blockages can stop blood flow, and plaque debris can dislodge to the brain, causing a potentially disabling stroke.

The current surgical or “open” procedure used to clean out a clogged carotid artery is generally considered safe and effective but requires a large incision along the patient’s neck. The procedure is usually done under general anesthesia and carries surgical risks that may make it unsuitable to high-risk patients.

While a less invasive alternative has been available for years, it carries a risk of stroke. Called carotid artery stenting, the procedure involves inserting a mesh stent through an artery in the groin and threading it into the carotid artery to hold the vessel open. Since the stent can knock plaque loose, a tiny umbrella-like filter is first inserted through the blocked artery to catch this debris and stop it from entering the brain. But the filter itself still carries a risk of stroke because it, too, can dislodge plaque.

“The new technique and device system may reduce the chances of these complications,” said vascular surgeon Jeffrey Jim, MD, who performs the procedure. The procedure is called transcarotid stenting with dynamic flow reversal.

“The term ‘transcarotid’ refers to the technique of delivering a stent directly into the carotid artery from a small incision in the neck,” said Jim, an assistant professor of surgery. “It is a shorter and potentially safer route than the traditional minimally invasive method of stenting via the groin. And it can be done using local anesthetic.”

The “dynamic flow reversal” part of the procedure refers to a device that temporarily reverses blood flow in the blocked artery, diverting it away from the brain and into tubing set up outside the body. Filters in this tubing remove any plaque debris knocked loose during placement of the stent. The tubing then directs the blood back into the body through a vein near the groin. Since blood enters the brain through multiple arteries, patients are not adversely affected by this temporary flow reversal in a single vessel.

“Temporarily reversing the flow ensures that the patient’s brain is protected at all times,” said Jim. “This procedure holds the potential to optimize treatment for our older, high-risk patients. Because it is less invasive, there likely is a lower risk of cardiac complications and patients can recover faster.”

Washington University School of Medicine is one of 25 centers around the world participating in the clinical study, which is expected to enroll 140 patients.

The study is funded by Silk Road Medical, developers of the transcarotid stenting with dynamic flow reversal system.

Editor's note:Patients who have had the procedure are available for media interviews.

Travis Mohrman/Tyson Research Center

A green frog, Rana (Lithobates) clamitans, in a pond at Washington University's Tyson Research Center. In Missouri, this frog’s tadpoles are often infected with the amphibian chytrid fungus but rarely sickened by it, creating an opportunity to delve into chytrid’s place in aquatic ecosystems.

The skin fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), also known as amphibian chytrid, first made its presence felt in 1993 when dead and dying frogs began turning up in Queensland, Australia. Since then it has sickened and killed frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians worldwide, driving hundreds of species to extinction.

As a postdoctoral researcher Kevin Smith studied Bd in South Africa, home to the African clawed frog, a suspected vector for the fungus. When he took a position at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is now interim director of the Tyson Research Center and adjunct professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, he worked on other problems. 

But whenever he visited a pond, he collected tadpoles and checked their mouth parts (often a fungal hot spot) under the microscope, just out of curiosity.

He found the fungus in about a third of the ponds whose tadpoles he checked. The obvious questions were: Why only a third? Why didn’t it occur in all amphibian populations in a region where it is found?

The amphibians and the fungus have reached an evolutionary truce in Missouri, where the chytrid is endemic rather than epidemic. Because there was no pressure to rescue an amphibian population, Smith had the time and the opportunity to look more broadly and to study the entire pond ecosystem.

Together with then-undergraduate student Alex Strauss, Smith collected physical and chemical data and surveyed the species living in 29 ponds in east-central Missouri. The results of this study are published in the Sept. 25  edition of PLOS ONE.

Somewhat to Smith’s surprise, it was statistically possible to distinguish infected from noninfected ponds, a finding he likens to being able to predict that influenza will circulate in some cities but not others.

“We don’t know exactly what the key factors are but just knowing that not every pond appears to be suitable for chytrid in a given year is a very big step,” he said.

The study also suggested that patterns of Bd infection might be an indirect effect of variations in invertebrate communities. What this meant was unclear, since chytrid was thought to be an amphibian specialist.

But while the pond study was underway, other researchers announced that crayfish and nematodes can be infected with chytrid, raising the possibility that invertebrates act as alternative hosts or biological reservoirs for the fungus.

“Alternative hosts and reservoirs have been a key missing piece in our understanding of chytrid epidemiology,” Smith said. The fungus, like any pathogen, cannot be effectively controlled unless all its hiding places are known.

An ancient fungus
Chytrid, or more properly amphibian chytrid, since there are about 1,000 species of fungus in the class Chytridiomycetes, specializes on keratin, a structural protein found in the skin, hair, nails and similar tissues of vertebrates. 

“As far as we know, it doesn’t infect any other animal protein,” Smith said. “So that’s one of the most important restrictions on where it lives.”

In amphibians, chytrid infects and damages the skin, which amphibians use to breathe and absorb water. Once the fungus takes hold, it causes a disease called chytridiomycosis, which is usually fatal.

“You can sometimes tell when a frog is infected,” Smith said, “by the way it walks. It is slow and spraddles its legs, as though its skin is painful or chafed. When we grabbed frogs like those in South Africa and took samples, they were always heavily infected with the fungus,” he said.

Unlike more familiar fungi such as mushrooms, which release spores that drift through the air, chytrids, among the earliest fungi to evolve, are aquatic and release flagellated zoospores that swim through the water.

“Laboratory studies suggest the zoospores can live independently only about a day or so. They’re considered to be very fragile,” Smith said. “They get expunged from the fungal cell inside the amphibian skin, they swim around for about a day, and if they don’t infect something with keratin, they’re no longer viable. That’s what’s generally thought.

“That’s why we focused on the aquatic habitat,” Smith said. “Animals may be able to move the fungus from one location to another, but it’s not just drifting in the air. Our question was: If the aquatic habitat is key, why don’t we find chytrid in every aquatic habitat?”

The big picture
As a community and conservation ecologist, Smith suspected the answer couldn’t be found by selectively studying the amphibians dying of chytrid. Scientists racing to save amphibian species from extinction have understandably tended to narrow their focus to the pathogen and its victims.

“It’s the crisis of amphibians dying and going extinct that makes us focus so narrowly,” Smith said.

But Smith has never seen any evidence that chytrid causes mortality in this part of Missouri, although it is one of many factors leading to the decline of hellbenders, a large salamander native to the Ozarks.

Because chytrid is an endemic disease in Missouri, Smith realized he could back up, slow down and study it as an ecologist. “That hasn’t happened as often as it should,” he said. 

Elizabeth Biro/Tyson Research Center

The pond survey crew gets its feet wet. From left, Joseph Mihaljevic, who graduated in 2009; Alex Strauss, the first author on the PLOS ONE paper, who graduated in 2010; Miguel Mattias, then a visiting researcher; and Christina McPike, then a Boston College undergraduate working as an undergraduate fellow.

Wading in
So Smith recruited a team of students to study the ecosystems of 29 ponds in east-central Missouri. The team assayed larval amphibians for chytrid, collected physical and chemical data, and identified amphibian, macroinvertebrate and zooplankton species living in the ponds.

“I was half-expecting it to be just an absolute mess, that there would be no distinguishing characteristic about ponds that have chytrid or ponds that don’t,” he said. “But instead, we found that the ponds that had chytrid were consistently more similar to one another than the ponds that didn’t have chytrid in many different measures.”

“That's a very powerful finding,” he said. “The thinking had been that chytrid required keratin, appropriate temperatures and water — and that was it. That’s what we were stuck with. Now we know that there must be additional constraints because some ponds that meet these criteria don’t harbor the fungus.”

A statistical technique for ferreting out causal relationships suggested that this pattern was an indirect effect mediated by the ponds’ invertebrate communities.

“They may be alternative hosts,” Smith said. “That would be the most parsimonious explanation.” But they might also be reservoirs (sites where the fungus can survive when there is no available host).

“The presence or absence of alternative hosts or reservoirs has a huge effect on the dynamics of the disease, and ultimately on the fate of the amphibians it attacks. If there are reservoirs we need to know about them, because otherwise it will be impossible to interrupt the chain of transmission,” he said.

Tyson Research Center

A central newt, Notophthalmus viridescens makes its home in a Missouri pond. Newts are a common pond amphibian in Missouri and are often infected with the amphibian chytrid fungus.

More evidence has since accumulated against the suspect group that fell out of the statistics of the pond study.

One group, looking for a model organism that could be used to study chytrid, showed that it can infect and kill the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Another team reported that crayfish are able to transmit chytrid, which infects the lining of their gastrointestinal tracts.

“Focusing only on amphibians to understand chytrid is like focusing only on people to understand Lyme disease,” Smith said. “In the case of Lyme disease, we know that mice matter, that deer matter, that oak trees matter. Many different factors lead to there being a lot of Lyme in some cases and not others,” Smith said.

Smith hopes that research in areas where chytrid is endemic may be able to help amphibians in areas where it is epidemic. The only alternative so far is the Amphibian Ark, a global effort to maintain threatened amphibians in captivity until they can be “secured in the wild.”

The McDonnell Academy’s goal is to develop future global leaders by recruiting graduates of Washington University in St. Louis’ 28 partner institutions around the world to doctoral or professional degree programs at WUSTL.

Now there is a special McDonnell Academy program for undergraduates. The McDonnell Academy International Leadership Institute (MAILI) is a five-week, summer academic experience for undergraduates from Washington University and the academy’s international partner institutions. The pilot program was launched during summer 2013.

“This program offers a unique opportunity for WUSTL students to participate in an international experience here at home,” said Becki Zurovec, assistant director for Summer Institutes and Special Programs. “These students are living and socializing together outside of the classroom. They are building relationships and making lasting friendships. Our hope with this program is to create a network of global leaders.”

In addition to taking six units of undergraduate course work, students attend guest lectures, participate in team-building activities and St. Louis community projects, and acquire an international-student perspective from current McDonnell Academy scholars and other international students.

Erin Amato, a WUSTL junior in Arts & Sciences and MAILI 2013 participant, said she enjoyed the classes she took and the small class size. However, she said the most rewarding aspect of the program was living and taking classes with international students.

“I enjoyed introducing them to St. Louis and hearing about their academics and social activities. We shared our insights on different aspects of American culture, as well,” Amato said. “I would definitely say that my learning experiences in the MAILI program were just as valuable outside of the classroom as in my academic classes.”

The goal of the MAILI program is to teach leadership skills to undergraduates using a research-oriented curriculum.

“The program has a curriculum that deals with the pressing issues of the day — public health, aging, energy and the environment,” said Henry Biggs, PhD, JD, associate director of the McDonnell Academy. “The leaders of tomorrow cannot avoid these issues. In fact, it is more important than ever that they have a strong command of these issues.”

The graduate students in the McDonnell Academy help with the program.

“It made sense to leverage these students and their leadership skills so they can more actively pass along those skills to the next generation,” Biggs said. “The MAILI program is ultimately quite unique nationally: it uses leading graduate scholars from a variety of disciplines and a variety of countries to teach a more fully globally oriented leadership framework to undergraduates.”

Next summer, the program would like to enroll 50 WUSTL undergraduates and 50 students from partner universities. MAILI is open to all WUSTL undergraduates in good academic standing. The deadline for WUSTL applicants is May 1. More information is available here.

“Last year we had a great start, and we are looking forward to expanding the program to more McDonnell Academy partner schools and to increase WUSTL student participation,” Zurovec said.

Thirteen years after its inception and more than 165,000 coats later, the Warners’ Warm-up Coat Drive has become a dependable resource for disadvantaged men, women and children in the St. Louis region. 

The Washington University in St. Louis Police Department is teaming up with the Kurt Warner First Things First Foundation and Operation Food Search for the 13th Annual Warners' Warm-Up Coat Drive.

From Nov. 1–14, WUSTL faculty, staff and students are encouraged to donate new and gently used winter coats. Coats may be dropped off at the University Police Deptartment, on the ground floor of Lien House on the South 40.

Alternatively, to arrange for the WUPD to come elsewhere on campus to pick up coats for donation, contact Wendy Oloteo at (314) 935-7698.

For more information on Warners' Warm-Up, visit kurtwarner.org.

A town hall meeting at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will address employment needs of the autism community. The university is collaborating with Autism Speaks and Extraordinary Ventures in hosting "Advancing the Role and Impact of Small Businesses in Employing Adults with Autism."

The town hall meeting focuses on small-business employment opportunities for individuals on the autism spectrum. St. Louis is one of nine cities involved in the series of meetings. The panel features small businesses and service providers that have implemented successful employment programs for people with autism.

The meeting and panel discussion will be held from 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 6, in the Connor Auditorium of the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center. The meeting is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. For more information or to make a reservation, call (314) 704-5731 or email adultservices@autismspeaks.org.

MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon, JD, PhD, who holds distinguished professorships at both the University of Michigan and Harvard University, currently is focusing on her work as an internationally successful litigator against sex crimes and human trafficking. Her talk, “Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality” will be at noon Thursday, Nov. 14, in Anheuser-Busch Hall's Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

The event is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Law, Identity and Culture Initiative of the School of Law; the Brown School; the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program in Arts & Sciences; and the Association of Women Faculty, with support funding from the Office of the Provost.

One only has to summon visions of the television show Mad Men to understand that sexual harassment in the mid-20th century workplace  was a fact of life for many women. Without legal recourse, women were vulnerable to sexual assault by their bosses and co-workers.

Recognizing the need for such laws, MacKinnon helped form a groundbreaking legal theory that sexual harassment and sexual abuse violate equality rights, a theory the U.S. Supreme Court accepted in 1986, thus pioneering the legal claim that harassment in the workplace constitutes actionable discrimination.

She is also known, with Andrea Dworkin, for developing the legal argument that pornography can be construed as a violation of one’s civil rights under the law.

The Nov. 14 lecture will address her more current focus on the litigation, legislation and policy development on women’s human rights in the international arena. In addition, she has served as special gender adviser to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and she successfully represented Bosnian survivors of sexual atrocities, winning legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide and securing a $745 million settlement on their behalf.

Semester Online, the online learning consortium of leading universities, announced Wednesday its first international partners — Trinity College Dublin and the University of Melbourne. Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, also recently joined Semester Online, bringing the total number of participating institutions to 10.

"There are a lot of benefits to having these international partners," said Diana Hill, PhD, assistant dean in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and director at the Semester Online Consortium. "First, there will be opportunities to take courses that are not offered here. Also, our students will have their students as classmates. It's an opportunity to learn from people who are not just from a different institution, but from a different continent and culture."

Starting next month, WUSTL students may sign up for one of 21 Semester Online courses. New offerings include “Ireland and Rebellion” from Trinity College; "Classical Mythology" from the University of Melbourne; and "Introduction to Bioethics" from Wake Forest. Other courses include “Drugs and Behavior” from Emory University; “Leading and Managing” from the University of North Carolina; and “The Hebrew Bible: Then and Now” from Brandeis University. Washington University also is expanding its own Semester Online offerings, adding “Introduction to Psychology,” with Brian Carpenter, PhD, an associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, and “Critical Earth Issues” by Michael Wysession, PhD, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, also in Arts & Sciences. Bill Lowry, PhD, a professor of political science, in Arts & Sciences, will continue to teach the online version of his popular course “Environmental and Energy Policies.”

Visit Semester Online or the Interdisciplinary Programs section of WUSTL’s online course catalog for a complete list of offerings. Students may register through the WebSTAC system. Semester Online courses are free to WUSTL students. Classes are open to sophomores, juniors and seniors.

“Registering is easy," Hill said. “The process is no different than registering for classes on campus.”

Semester Online debuted this fall with 11 courses. Unlike MOOCs, or massive open online courses, Semester Online courses are limited to 20 students per section. Each course includes two weekly 80-minute classes, a pre-produced lecture and a live session. The pre-produced asynchronous material often features guest interviews, panel discussions and dramatizations; the live class is for discussion and debate. Political science student Cecelia Joy Perez said the weekly live session looks and feels like a Google Hangout.

"At first it's kind of a shock because you see everyone up close in this online classroom, but it didn't take long for me to feel comfortable and to contribute," said Joy Perez, who took both Lowry's "Environmental and Energy Policies” and "The Rise of Christianity" from the University of Notre Dame. "The format is engaging. And it's intense. You are really motivated to keep up with your reading and videos because you are having these discussions." 

Joy Perez did not set out to be a pioneer in online education. She hurt her spine cliff jumping the day before the fall semester and had trouble getting around campus. Her adviser allowed her to take two Semester Online classes; WUSTL students typically are allowed to take one class per semester.

"I've told my friends I would definitely recommend it," said Joy Perez, a junior. "My friends have asked me a lot about the rigor and I've told them the classes are really good. Think about it — all of these schools are really competitive. The material we are covering and the quality of professors is really high, and the professors do things you couldn't do in a regular lecture. Like, Professor Lowry brought in experts from environmental circles. I don't think every professor could do this, but it seems like they have picked the ones who shine best through the screen."

Associate Provost Shelley Milligan said only 17 WUSTL students tried Semester Online classes in the fall. She expects that number to grow as more students like Joy Perez share their experiences.

"We live and work in an institution that does this really well on campus, so we assume there can't be anything that even comes close to matching it," Milligan said. "The intention is not to replace our residential educational experience. The whole point is to replicate what we do on campus and create something that is high quality, with a high level of interaction and educational value. If it's not that, none of us are going to want to be involved in it."

The prospect of more direct interaction with students prompted Carpenter to create a Semester Online version of "Introduction to Psychology," which typically draws 500 students.

"With that many students, it's a challenge to get to know the students and the kinds of discussions you have are limited," said Carpenter, who recently recorded the course's asynchronous material. "The experience has already forced me to take a step back and think about my big lecture and consider strategic ways for it to be more interactive."

Milligan said the both the university and Semester Online will start assessing the online educational experience at the close of the fall semester and will continue to monitor the program's quality throughout the spring. In the meantime, Semester Online continues to recruit top peer institutions and to develop new courses. This summer, for instance, Washington University will offer “Introduction to Computer Science,” by Ron Cytron, PhD, professor of computer science.

"We are going for that balance," Milligan said. "We want balance across disciplines and our member schools. And we want interesting courses and electives our students can't get on their home campus. Ultimately, it's about enriching our students' learning experience."

The Lifelong Learning Institute is at 9 N. Jackson Ave. Parking is free for this event in the West Campus parking garage. Entrances to the parking garage are on Jackson Avenue and on Lee Avenue off Forsyth.

The information session, which will feature an overall orientation followed by several sample classes, is free and open to adults ages 55 and older. Refreshments will be served.

LLI offers a variety of courses that emphasize peer learning and active class participation by senior adults. Classes are not for credit and there are no exams or grades. Most subjects are offered in three eight-week regular terms (fall, winter and spring) and one four-week summer session.

The LLI offers more than 30 classes, which are held at the LLI, on topics ranging from Broadway musicals, politics, current events, science and opera to genealogy, writing, literature and movies. Course offerings change each term.

Sid hastings/WUSTL Photos

Lifelong Learning Institute members J.J. Burke (far left) and Peggy Gibstine listen as Raymond Robinson leads a discussion during a LLI World War II course that spanned four years and covered every aspect of the war.

Sponsored by University College in Arts & Sciences, LLI currently has more than 1,000 active members.

“Members join for the sheer love and pleasure of learning,” said Katie Compton, LLI’s executive director. “Having retired, many of our learners finally have the time to read James Joyce or study neurophilosophy or write their memoirs.

“They benefit from the knowledge and life experience of their classmates and often make new and lasting friendships with people who share their interests,” Compton said.

For more information and to RSVP, visit lli.ucollege.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4237.

About Lifelong Learning Institute

The Lifelong Learning Institute at Washington University in St. Louis offers peer learning through courses in art and architecture, contemporary issues, creative writing, economics, film studies, history, literature, math, science, technology, music and philosophy. 

Knowledgeable members plan, develop and present the courses and related field trips, workshops, and cultural and social events. When a person enrolls in a course, he or she becomes a member of LLI. Course listings are available online at lli.ucollege.wustl.edu. For more information, contact (314) 935-4237.

jerry naunheim jr./WUSTL Photos

Washington University in St. Louis students form a conga line during Dance Marathon in 2012. Last year, Dance Marathon raised $129,000 for Children's Miracle Network hospitals St. Louis Children's Hospital and SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center. To learn more, visit this page.

Veteran Dance Marathon volunteer Pamela Rivera has this advice for novice participants: hydrate, hydrate, hydrate; wear comfortable shoes and choose your clothes wisely. Rivera said her own wardrobe malfunction last year left her “a hot mess.”

“Remember, it gets hot,” said Rivera. “I dressed up as Ariel, and as much as I loved my costume, the fins got really itchy. And the wig would not stay put. It kept swiveling around my head.”

Rivera

But the event’s real stars are the ambassador families of the Children’s Miracle Network, Rivera said.

“When you hear their stories, you realize how lucky we all are,” she said. “We are all stressed; we all have exams, but they have faced much greater challenges. If they can be there, we can be there.”

Cornblath

Hate dancing? Try four square or musical chairs — or Twister. Play with the ambassador children at the arts and crafts table. Ham it up with your friends in the photo booth.

“We don’t want people to sit down,” Rivera said. “We are standing in honor of the families and the doctors and nurses who work 12-hour shifts. They don’t get to sit down.”

Kate Durso, Children’s Miracle Network programs director, calls Dance Marathon the happiest day on campus. She helped stage early Dance Marathons as a WUSTL undergraduate. Now, she helps organize Dance Marathons at three local universities.

“For the students, it’s a time to relax and unwind and celebrate our families,” said Durso, who earned a bachelor's degree in women's studies in 2002. “And for our Miracle kids, it is a time of hope. The older ones get to see what a life in college looks like. And our younger ones are like, ‘These cool college kids want to dance and play and sing with us.’ They love it.”

Now in its 15th year, WUSTL's Dance Marathon has raised more than $1.4 million for the two member pediatric hospitals of the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals of Greater St. Louis: St. Louis Children’s Hospital and SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center.

“Because of their sheer passion and energy, Washington University students are able to raise in one night a ton of money,” Durso said. “Families always say to me that they are impressed by these students, who are so busy, make time to do something good.”

Pete Souza/official white house photo

President Barack Obama meets with Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal finalists and winners in the East Room of the White House. Washington University ophthalmologist David E. Vollman, MD (fourth from left in the back row), was among the honorees.

Vollman, an instructor in ophthalmology and visual sciences, treats patients at Washington University School of Medicine and at the John Cochran Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis. The specific medal for which he was a finalist is the Call to Service Medal, which “recognizes a federal employee whose professional achievements reflect the positive impact that a new generation brings to public service.” Each year, that award recognizes a federal employee under age 35 with less than five years of federal service.

Vollman was chosen as a 2013 finalist for implementing a pilot project tracking the results of cataract treatment. With a combined post-graduate degree in medicine and business administration, he worked with other clinicians and with software developers to build a tool for collecting data. He then used that tool to determine that complication rates for cataract surgery are low in the VA health-care system and comparable to rates seen in the private sector.

With the pilot project on cataracts complete, Vollman has been selected for a lead role in a follow-up project now underway to collect and study similar data from across the Veterans Health Administration.

Following the White House ceremony, Vollman said, “It was an amazing honor to be recognized by President Obama in the White House for my work providing quality eye care to our veterans. I will always remember shaking the president’s hand and having him thank me for my service to our country.”

Vollman received his medical and business degrees from The Ohio State University in 2006. His clinical and research interests include comprehensive eye care, cataract surgery, refractive cataract surgery, health-care outcomes, cost-effective delivery of health care and quality improvement. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles on those subjects.

The ceremony to honor the finalists was Oct. 23.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, and his colleagues will evaluate the quality, effectiveness and safety of generic drugs used to treat depression as part of a study funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are studying the quality, effectiveness and safety of generic drugs used to treat depression.

The research is supported by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is the only study of its kind funded by the agency. The study will determine whether brand-name 300-mg bupropion hydrochloride (HCl) extended-release (ER) tablets — sold commercially as Wellbutrin XL — and the various generic versions of bupropion HCl ER tablets work the same in the body and deliver the same therapeutic benefits.

The principal investigator is Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology and an expert in clinical pharmacology, drug metabolism, drug interactions, mechanisms of drug toxicity and pharmacogenetics, a clinical pursuit that focuses on understanding the ways that individuals can respond to the same drug differently.

“Since generic versions of extended-release bupropion HCl were introduced, there have been some reports that they may not be as effective as the brand-name drug and may be associated with adverse events,” Kharasch said. “The first time a 300-mg generic version of this drug was tested, there were significant differences in drug concentrations in the blood compared with what was seen with the brand-name drug, Wellbutrin XL, and that generic formulation eventually was taken off the market. Now, we’re going to study several generics to evaluate their blood concentrations in patients, how effective they are, and whether they are associated with side effects or with relapse. This study will go beyond the tests that have been conducted previously.”

Kharasch, an anesthesiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and also vice chancellor for research at Washington University, is collaborating with Eric Lenze, MD, professor of psychiatry. They will study blood samples from patients with depression to learn how much of the generic and brand-name drugs get into the bloodstream and how long the medications remain in the system.

And they’ll compare how patients say they feel when taking brand-name versus generic versions of the same drug. Lenze, an expert on treatment studies for depression, developed innovative approaches for patient participation and monitoring in this study. Patients will report their symptoms daily using a cellphone-based program, which will be easier and more accurate than less frequent in-person assessments, the usual method for monitoring symptoms.

The Washington University researchers also will collaborate with national pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts to look at outcomes of people taking the various formulations of the drug.

“This project promises to develop a new model for determining drug safety and effectiveness using data from a pharmacy benefit manager on a massive scale to actively monitor patients taking the drug,” Kharasch said. “This model has the potential to help us detect potential problems and to intervene much earlier than currently possible. We very much value the opportunity to collaborate with Express Scripts and have access to its wealth of data on this project to improve patient safety.”

Express Scripts manages the pharmacy benefit for tens of millions of Americans, processing more than 1 billion prescriptions each year.

“Another goal of the research is to study the pharmacogenetics of bupropion — that is, how patients’ genetic makeup affects their blood concentrations and response to the drug,” Kharasch said. “We also will learn much more about the genetic variability of one of the major enzymes in the liver that is responsible for eliminating drugs from the body, and how that influences clinical outcomes.”

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and its Department of Pediatrics have established funding for three pediatric scholars named in honor of a trio of highly regarded former pediatricians at the university.

The School of Medicine is funding the Scholars in Pediatrics with $3 million to be divided among three faculty members, in support of their time and efforts devoted to scholarship and teaching. Each inaugural scholar is being appointed for three years.

“The former faculty members whose careers are being honored with these awards would be pleased to know the work of talented, dedicated professionals will be so greatly enhanced with these awards,” said Alan L. Schwartz, MD, PhD, chairman of the university’s Department of Pediatrics and the Harriet B. Spoehrer Professor of Pediatrics. “These inaugural scholars already have contributed greatly to the university and the field of medicine, but this allows them to further meet their potential — and at a critical time for medical research and education, considering the nation’s budget crisis and its impact on medical advancement.”

The new Scholars in Pediatrics, each of whom practices at St. Louis Children's Hospital, are well-known in their fields. They are Paul Hruz, MD, PhD, Shalini Shenoy, MD, and Andrew White, MD. 

Hruz

Santiago served as co-director of the Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes from 1984 to 1997 and, like Hruz, was recognized globally for his research in childhood diabetes. He was a leader in the development and testing of miniaturized portable insulin infusion pumps, as well as other contributions in diabetes care. At the time of his death in 1997, Santiago was involved in the Diabetes Prevention Program, at that point the largest national diabetes study to evaluate whether medication or lifestyle changes could prevent or delay adult-onset diabetes.

Shenoy

Vietti, a pediatric oncologist who earned the nickname “the mother of pediatric cancer therapy,” was director of the School of Medicine’s Division of Hematology/Oncology from 1970 to 1986. A leading clinical and translational investigator, she conceived the concept of multi-institution pediatric cooperative groups and founded the Pediatric Oncology Group (POG), now known as the Children’s Oncology Group (COG). Under her leadership, POG grew to more than 100 institutions and 1,500 investigators. Vietti, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and of radiology, died in 2010.

White

Dodge, one of the founders of pediatric neurology, served as chair of the Department of Pediatrics from 1967 to 1986. A professor emeritus of pediatrics and of neurology at the School of Medicine, Dodge is credited with bringing the Department of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital to international prominence for clinical care, teaching and research. Known for his vision, wisdom and compassion, he was a respected clinician and revered teacher and mentor. He died in 2009.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.