News

Members of the Washington University in St. Louis community are among those selected by Focus St. Louis, the region’s premier leadership organization, to participate in its 2024-25 civic leadership programs. Lindsey Alt, director of leadership development and of the Institute for Leadership Excellence in the Office of Human Resources, and Sean Armstrong, dean of the School of Continuing & Professional Studies, were selected among 60 local leaders.

The city of St. Louis’ Community Development Administration (CDA) said Wednesday it has awarded $3.7 million through its Neighborhood Transformation Grants program. The funding is being provided through programs focused on community-driven development, affordable housing, vacant lot beautification and neighborhood planning. CDA began awarding its Neighborhood Transformation Grants in 2023, starting the program with funds from the federal American Rescue Plan (ARPA). 

Experiences with St. Louis organizations led WashU alumna Samantha Searls to a career in advocating for immigrants. Now a program director at Cincinnati’s Ignite Peace, with a focus on immigrant rights, Searls was named one of the city’s 10 Women of the Year for 2023.

Prescribing medicine helps doctors respond to heart disease. Now, researchers here are studying if prescribing fruits and vegetables might help prevent it. The new Washington University study, called NutriConnect, examines if increasing access to healthy food can create lasting, positive lifestyle changes for people at risk for heart disease — the leading cause of death in St. Louis city, county and Missouri.

This spring saw the graduation of the first cohort of the WashU Pledge, the bold scholarship initiative for Pell-eligible students from Missouri and southern Illinois set into motion by Chancellor Andrew Martin at his 2019 inauguration.

Delmar Divine, the mixed-use redevelopment of the former St. Luke’s Hospital built on the “Delmar Divide,” will undergo a second phase of development. Construction is expected to begin later this year to add about 80 new apartments, additional offices and community space at Delmar Divine, located at the former St. Luke’s Hospital at 5501 Delmar Blvd. in the city of St. Louis’ West End neighborhood.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is launching a Center for Translational Bioinformatics, an innovative joint effort of the university’s McDonnell Genome Institute and the Institute for Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics. The center will bring together experts from diverse fields to accelerate precision medicine research and improve patient care by integrating comprehensive patient data and expansive genomic datasets.

St. Louis’ Olympic Day celebration on Friday, June 21, 2024 allowed participants to walk side-by-side with our region’s Olympians, including Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Jim Campbell, Sarah Haskins, Ty Keough, and Scott Touzinsky.

As a Washington University student, Andrew Glantz launched an app he hoped would turn food photos into food donations. A decade later, the app, GiftAMeal, has sent some 2 million meals — and hundreds of thousands of dollars — to food banks across the country.

When Shradha Challa, MBA 2024, was challenged to develop a business idea that solved a problem, she focused on a problem she had experienced in St. Louis: Getting a good cup of chai. Finding the solution set Challa on a path to founding her own business, Rasa Chai. It’s also brought recognition in the form of a national entrepreneurship prize.