Waves of Change
Alumna María Isabel Dabrowski discusses science outreach, the importance empathy and how she launched a career in environmental conservation. María Isabel Dabrowski, AB ’18, combines her fascinations with marine life and behavioral science as a senior outreach associate at Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment, the world’s first center focused exclusively on behavioral science […]
New tool to enable exploration of human-environment interactions
Universal device will allow transdisciplinary collaboration globally Spurred by the current climate crisis, there has been a heightened attention within the scientific community in recent years to how past climate variation contributed to historic human migration and other behaviors. Now, an international group of scientists — including archaeologists, historians, climate scientists, paleo-scientists, a volcanologist and […]
Global Health Center partners bring local to global effort full circle
On November 15, leaders from the Global Health Center at the Institute for Public Health and Department of Medicine, cardiovascular experts from the University of Abuja, Nigeria and project partners and leaders from Parents as Teachers National Center joined WashU alumni, faculty, students, and members of the WashU Alumni and Development team for a special […]
Senior Tori Harwell selected as a Rhodes Scholar
WashU’s 30th Rhodes Scholar wants to help grassroots leaders find climate solutions Washington University in St. Louis senior Victoria “Tori” Harwell has been selected as a Rhodes Scholar, the 30th winner in university history. Harwell was among the 32 students nationwide selected Saturday, Nov. 11, to receive the prestigious honor that provides scholars the opportunity to earn an […]
How underground fungi shape forests
The story and science of a Forest Global Earth Observatory A large study involving 43 research plots in the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) Network — including a swath of trees at Tyson Research Center, the environmental field station of Washington University in St. Louis — has helped clarify the power of underground fungi to shape forests. From the […]
Telling a tale of two cities
Senior Lauren Harpold received a Summer Undergraduate Research Award and was named a Pulitzer Reporting Fellow for her research on land use and gentrification in St. Louis and Amsterdam. For as long as she’s been at WashU, Lauren Harpold has been thinking about housing. The senior anthropology major grew up in Houston, Texas, and lived […]
Woman the Hunter: WashU alums collaborate to challenge gender stereotypes of early humans
A Scientific American cover story by anthropology alumnae Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy, both PhD ’14, shows the power of collaboration, then and now. An early human hurls a spear at an antelope and tracks the wounded animal across the African savanna. Do you have a clear picture of the hunter in mind? Perhaps she’s […]
Study links changes in global water cycle to higher temperatures
Over last 2,000 years, rising and falling temperatures have altered the way water moves around the planet It’s a multibillion dollar question: What will happen to water as temperatures continue to rise? There will be winners and losers with any change that redistributes where, when and how much water is available for humans to drink […]
Chen wins digital humanities fellowship
Ruochen Chen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a Gale Non-Residential Fellowship from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). The fellowship is intended to help scholars expand the fields of Asian studies for research and teaching, and to foster the skills to apply […]
Holiness and humanity in the Middle Ages
Mark Gregory Pegg’s new book explores love, heresy, and the individual stories of the medieval West. In his new book, “Beatrice’s Last Smile: A New History of the Middle Ages,” Professor of History Mark Gregory Pegg traces humanity’s changing relationship to the divine over 1,200 years of western medieval history. Recently, he sat down with the Ampersand […]