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Dressing bullet wounds for the Bullet Related Injury Clinic. Analyzing biosolids for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. Developing LGBTQ outreach plans for the Alzheimer’s Association Greater Missouri Chapter. This summer, Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate students performed these valuable services, and more, as part of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement’s St. Louis Fellows Program, which provides career and civic leadership training to students as well as a $6,000 stipend to intern at a St. Louis nonprofit.

In high school, Hamza Jalal held a human heart. Only a junior, Jalal had the opportunity to study dissected cadavers in the anatomy lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. With faculty and trainees providing guidance, he studied the spongy lobes of the lungs; the brain’s soft, maze-like folds; and brownish, bean-shaped kidneys. But it was the heart that helped him envision his future as a doctor.

On the final day of the College Prep Summer Academy at Washington University in St. Louis, the program’s 10th cohort gathered for a vision board exhibit. Each scholar pasted their boards with images and phrases representative of their goals and aspirations for the future.

The Washington University in St. Louis Career Center has announced the inaugural cohort of the Pershing Fellowship in Nonprofit Leadership, an innovative internship program that introduces rising juniors and seniors to career paths within the St. Louis nonprofit community.

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine student Alexandra Zdonczyk both loves the people and places that make St. Louis unique and recognizes the disparities and injustices that hold it back. For both reasons, she is staying. “I feel at home in St. Louis,” said Zdonczyk, who will start her residency in ophthalmology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital after she graduates with a medical degree this month.

High school senior Marye’ Jones got two big surprises Monday, Dec. 12, when she walked into the library at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy in St. Louis Public Schools. There, she found her mother and two brothers holding balloons and flowers, along with two strangers, each bearing an envelope.

Washington University Libraries created exhibits in conjunction with a series of related events focusing on the history of slavery and the stories of enslaved individuals in St. Louis. The Slavery in St. Louis exhibition and the Archives of Resistance Event Series highlight primary source documents from the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections at University Libraries. A related display of Black Numismatics will be on display in the exhibition Coins Across Time: Ancient to American Numismatics. The exhibit and events arise from the WashU & Saver Project’s efforts to examine and address WashU’s historical entanglements with slavery, which include foundational research with contextualization of relevant collections in the library archives.

Revisit and reconstruct the history of Asian Americans in St. Louis utilizing an intuitive digital humanities tool, ArcGIS StoryMap. The story map, called Asia in Saint Louis, comprises images, interactive maps, narratives, and interview videos, and is conceptualized and structured around the four themes/sections: Historical traces, early Chinese Americans, early Japanese Americans, and Asian American civil rights. The story map will use primary sources from four local historical societies and archives: Washington University Libraries Special Collections, Missouri Historical Society, State Historical Society of Missouri-Saint Louis, and National Archives in Kansas City.

The St. Louis Policy Initiative brings diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to study policy in our region. Substantively, its research agendas engage with the most pressing policy challenges in society today. The initiative explores the relationship between racial segregation, political representation, housing policy, public health outcomes, and environmental outcomes in urban cores and their suburbs. For example, how does political representation translate into improved public health outcomes? To what extent do environmental factors drive disparities in home prices in Black and white neighborhoods?

Beginning Spring semester 2023, the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice (CRRJ) Action Research Lab at WashU will work with the award-winning CRRJ Clinic at Northeastern University Law School and other local and regional initiatives to research and redress histories and legacies of racial violence and repression in Missouri. The WU-CRRJ Action Research Lab at WashU is co-led by WashU faculty members and long time CRRJ research collaborators David Cunningham (Sociology) and Geoff Ward (AFAS).