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Sometimes life has a way of coming around full circle and during a recent college visit for our daughter, I was reminded of just what a great city St. Louis is. We stayed in the Cortex district, had dinner in the Central West End and were struck by how great the city looked. If you drew a straight line from Wash U, through Forest Park, continued through BJC’s campus, through Cortex and ended up at Union Station you would see a city on the upswing.

Washington University recently announced that Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH — one of the world’s most influential public health leaders — will become inaugural dean of its planned School of Public Health, effective Jan. 1, 2025. In this critical role, Galea will help shape WashU’s first new school in 100 years. The school is part of “Here and Next,” WashU’s 10-year strategic plan to make both the university and St. Louis a global hub for solving society’s deepest challenges.

The WashU & Slavery Project is an initiative started in spring 2021 to advance scholarship around WashU’s history with slavery. But the project is also reshaping public history in the St. Louis region by striving to add or improve information around slavery and racial discrimination at area historical sites, including the General Daniel Bissell House and the Missouri Botanical Garden.

There are infinite ways to map a place, and capturing the many dimensions of Ferguson is what Patty Heyda set out to do in her new book, “Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA.” With more than 100 maps that explore the distribution of libraries, fast-food franchises, airport runways and Fortune 500 companies in north St. Louis County, Heyda’s survey-like book illustrates how municipal planning has led to poverty and racial inequality.

If you want to learn about why life can be so difficult in north St. Louis County, Patty Heyda has mapped it all out in clear and convincing detail. Ten years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson brought stark, unwanted attention to the North County suburb, “Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA” provides a close, critical look into disparities in the region, how they compare with similar conditions in other parts of the county and what can be done to correct them.

In the world of Alzheimer’s disease research, where the setbacks have been many, the advent of blood tests has been hailed as a welcome innovation. And a St. Louis company is on the cutting edge of the field, pioneering new tests in hopes of advancing drug research and one day giving patients earlier indicators of the disease. The company has been growing its workforce and competing in the crowded field of medical firms developing faster methods of diagnosing Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.

While some some progress has been made in the 10 years since Michael Brown’s death on Aug. 9, 2014, in many ways we have regressed as a nation, said Kimberly Norwood, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis and editor of, and contributor to, the 2016 book “Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake That Rocked a Nation.” The reverberations from Brown’s shooting death manifested in the form of worldwide protests and contrite promises of investigations, reform and racial reckoning, Norwood said.

Food Outreach has partnered with Dan Ferris, an assistant professor of practice at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, to conduct a study to evaluate the effect of Food Outreach’s type II diabetes pilot program. Ferris’s study, titled “From Translation to Transformation: Medically Tailored Meals and Food-is-Medicine Approaches for Reducing Health Disparities in Diabetes Management,” aims to evaluate how a comprehensive Medically Tailored Meals program in St. Louis can improve outcomes for adults with type 2 diabetes.

Through more than 100 maps analyzing racial, socioeconomic, tax incentive, and urban planning, the new book from WashU professor Patty Heyda reveals how the physical environment impacts Americans’ lives.

Experiencing the nuances of local leadership and judicial impacts are an important part of student civic learning. In the Gephardt Institute’s St. Louis Fellows Program, the Fellows engage in summer weekly seminars centered on civic engagement. While most of their sessions are at Stix House, two of the seminars took place off campus at the Delmar DivINe and the Eagleton Federal Courthouse in Downtown St. Louis.