News

Will Ross, MD, the associate dean for diversity and the Alumni Endowed Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has received the 2024 Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The honor recognizes medical leaders committed to diversifying the health-care workforce. For nearly three decades, Ross, a nephrologist and public health epidemiologist, has devoted much of his career to eliminating health-care disparities in the U.S. and abroad as well as increasing diversity among medical students, residents and faculty. Additionally, Ross has developed innovative medical school pipeline programs designed to support promising students from underserved neighborhoods in St. Louis to pursue careers in the health-care industry.

With Top Tutors For Us, founder and WashU alum Angelica Harris is helping Black high school students build academic skills and improve college admissions test scores in St. Louis and across the U.S.

For the first time, annual research funding to Washington University in St. Louis has surpassed $1 billion. External funding supports WashU investigators tackling big challenges from Alzheimer’s disease to air pollution to childhood depression. Research funding also ripples across the economy, sparking job growth, new construction and local spending, said Chancellor Andrew D. Martin.

St. Louis Children’s Hospital will provide 1,000 free lockboxes over the next year to patients at risk of suicide or poisonings, both of which are increasingly taking the lives of Missouri children. “A locked box can be crucial to protecting older children, who may impulsively take medications as a form of self-harm or by accident,” said Dr. Lindsay Clukies, a Washington University emergency medicine physician at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

St. Louis-based Unlocked Labs is one of nine companies nationwide, and the only one from the Midwest, to win a $100,000 grant from the New York-based Robin Hood anti-poverty nonprofit’s AI Poverty Challenge to incorporate artificial intelligence into its educational platform for incarcerated people. Unlocked Labs is currently offering artificial intelligence-powered smart tutoring to around 6,000 incarcerated users in 13 prisons, partnering with Washington University, the State University of New York, Cornell University, Arizona State University and the non-profit Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, dean designate for Washington University in St. Louis’ planned School of Public Health, will provide a first look at his vision for the new school at the Public Health at WashU Annual Conference Oct. 21-22. The school — WashU’s first new school in a century — is set to galvanize public health research and scholarship in the St. Louis region. 

It’s the result of concerted efforts to attract immigrants here by organizations including Greater St. Louis Inc., the International Institute of St. Louis and the St. Louis Mosaic Project. By raising private donations for targeted recruitment, the campaign has attracted Latin American and Cuban immigrants and provided job training and placement with the help of the Missouri AFL-CIO. More than 1,300 Afghan refugees have come for programs including entrepreneurial grants. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones has created a city Office of New Americans to help facilitate immigrant settlement.

St. Louis is vying for a $160 million grant that leaders and academics hope will turbocharge the neuroscience sector and rectify entrenched health disparities throughout the region. The effort is part of an application to be one of the next National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines. NEURO360, the St. Louis proposal, is led by Washington University and BioSTL. It aims to build upon the region’s existing prowess in neuroscience research and develop those discoveries into new products, treatments and approaches to medicine, said Eric Leuthardt, chief of Washington University’s division of neurotechnology and one of NEURO360’s principal investigators.

Newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that efforts to increase the St. Louis metro’s immigrant population are succeeding, as the 15-county bi-state St. Louis metropolitan area recorded the highest percentage increase in foreign-born population among the 30 largest metro areas in the United States from 2022-2023. 

The name Charles Fleming might not be universally known in St. Louis, but it should be. The first African American graduate of Washington University’s University College with a B.A. in architecture in 1961, Fleming would go on to become one of the most successful Modernist architects in St. Louis, with offices across the country in Atlanta, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. And, at a time when federal assistance in home mortgages discriminated against African Americans, he helped members of his community work toward home ownership. Fleming died in St. Louis on July 8, 2024.