October 2024

Implementation of the Arts & Sciences Strategic Plan

October 23, 2024

Dedicated home for Arts & Sciences to break ground in spring

A ceremonial groundbreaking for the first dedicated home for Arts & Sciences on the Danforth Campus took place Oct. 8 at Washington University in St. Louis. The building will house some of the school’s premier departments and programs and serve as a cornerstone for scholarly and educational partnerships with other schools and units across campus.

Acree named vice dean of interdisciplinary initiatives and innovation

William Acree has been named the inaugural vice dean of interdisciplinary initiatives and innovation, a new position to support and enhance collaborative research and education across Arts & Sciences.

Building a "Nature City" from the ground up

The Living Earth Collaborative — a partnership between the Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis Zoo, and WashU — convened a symposium in September to imagine a St. Louis that lives in harmony with its natural surroundings.

With its core skills finalized, Literacies for Life and Career prepares to scale up

A thoroughly vetted list of 11 core skills, or literacies, will guide students' experiences in Arts & Sciences classrooms, preparing them to thrive as engaged citizens post-graduation. Go inside the years-long process of research, deliberation, and faculty feedback that helped Literacies for Life and Career finalize its key principles.

Three Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures teams win external funding

The Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures continues to demonstrate the power of research across multiple disciplines. Three of ITF's 12 teams earned external funding this summer and fall:

• Mindfulness Science and Practice faculty leads Todd Braver and Diana Parra Perez have won a National Institutes of Health grant to explore the potential of mindfulness to enhance cognitive health in Latinx older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
  
  
• Toward a Synergy Between Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience faculty lead Ralf Wessel and assistant professor of neuroscience Tom Franken have won a National Institutes of Health grant to study how artificial and primate brains process video imagery.
  
  
• Improving Data Integration Techniques faculty lead Ted Enamorado has won a National Science Foundation grant to expand his efforts in linking disparate sets of data.

Interpolations 2: Spatial Computing and Performance

All are welcome to the public session of Interpolations 2, an annual think tank devoted to exploring, envisioning, and extending performance and digital technologies in the twenty-first century. Presented by the Immersive Technology Collective, a multiyear cluster of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures at WashU.

Seminar: Framing public and open-access scholarship for professional advancement

Ambiguity about how non-traditional forms of academic publication, like public scholarship or open-access publications, “count” for tenure and promotion purposes can be a barrier to pursuing these valuable scholarly activities – but it doesn’t need to be. This seminar will provide strategies for how to frame such work and demonstrate its value to internal and external evaluators. Organized by the Program in Public Scholarship in collaboration with Open Access at Washington University.

TRIADS Training Series: Python Workshops

Throughout November, TRIADS will present a series of workshops on utilizing the Python programming language. If you're looking to boost your Python skills, TRIADS will offer classes in text analysis, webscraping, and large language models.

Seminar: Writing a Clear Tenure Statement

When distilling your research program, it can help to think of this as a public text: accessible, concise, and easy to follow by readers outside of your discipline or subfield. An effective tenure statement can be thought about in terms of narrative, focus, and trajectory; with these three keywords in mind, we’ll discuss how you can achieve a clear description of your scholarly work. Organized by the Program in Public Scholarship.

Rescheduled: "Hear the Rolling Thunder of Race," with Dr. Larry Ward

In this talk, based on Dr. Ward's book America's Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal, we will explore the origins of race as a social psychology, our consciousness of shared trauma, the iceberg and duality of race conditioning, and the antidotes of spiritual and social repair. Presented by Mindfulness Science and Practice, a multiyear cluster of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures.

Creative Practice Workshop Info Session

Learn more about the Center for the Literary Arts' Creative Practice Workshop, with CLA co-director Danielle Dutton leading an informational session on the workshop, its benefits for faculty, and how to apply.

Public Scholarship Symposium

The inaugural Public Scholarship Symposium will highlight outstanding examples of public scholarship by WashU faculty and students. Presentations will include a keynote lecture by public scholar and environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz, PhD (Weiner Distinguished Professor in Humanities, Missouri University of Science & Technology). Organized by the Program in Public Scholarship.

• The Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences (TRIADS) is undergoing a leadership transition this semester. Bo Li, the Stanley A. Sawyer Professor in Statistics and Data Science, will join TRIADS as co-director. Tammy English, previously associate director of TRIADS, will co-direct alongside Li. We'd like to thank outgoing director Jacob Montgomery for his tremendous service to TRIADS. Montgomery will stay involved with the group as one of its faculty fellows.