Science & Technology

Jennifer Heemstra was installed as the Charles Allen Thomas Professor in Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis during a ceremony April 10 at the Whittemore House. Her lab is focused on harnessing the capabilities of proteins and nucleic acids to address unmet needs in biomedicine and the environment.

Carbon emissions associated with air travel to professional conferences make up a sizable fraction of the emissions produced by researchers in academia. Andrea Gokus, a McDonnell Center postdoctoral fellow in Arts & Sciences, is advocating for astronomers and others to reduce those emissions.

Four Washington University in St. Louis faculty are among 250 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies. They are John Atkinson, MD, Pauline Kim, Adia Harvey Wingfield and Jeffrey Zacks.

Jianjun Guan, a materials scientist in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, received a four-year more than $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to design a system of nanoparticles that deliver drugs after a heart attack much more effectively than current methods allow.

In a paper published in ACS Nano, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis outline how they used a chemical probe to light up interlocking peptides. Their technique will help scientists differentiate synthetic peptides from toxic types found in Alzheimer’s disease.

Jenna Ditto, an assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University, is taking a closer look at the chemistry of indoor dust with a three-year $453,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis contributed to a national study that identifies how gentrified parts of a city have notably more urban wildlife than ungentrified parts of the same city.

Sang-Hoon Bae, a researcher at Washington University, has developed artificial heterostructures made of freestanding 2D and 3D membranes that have an energy density up to 19 times higher than commercially available capacitors.

Seanna Leath, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected to receive the Society for Research on Adolescence’s Early Career Award.

To protect migrating birds passing through the St. Louis region in late April and May, Washington University in St. Louis is partnering with the Lights Out Heartland initiative to curb light pollution.