Two scientists at the University of Missouri-St. Louis have received a $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for their research on carbohydrate synthesis. Keith Stine, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Alexei Demchenko, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are thrilled to move forward with their research, “Development and Application of Surface-Tethered Iterative Carbohydrate Synthesis.”

If Big Bird could fly, he would have difficulty replacing his flight feathers each year. A University of Missouri-St. Louis ornithologist and his colleagues have examined the time required to grow flight feathers as a function of body size. In an article published in the latest PLoS Biology journal, Robert Ricklefs, Curators’ Professor of Biology at UMSL, along with Sievert Rohwer and other researchers at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle, show that feather growth does not increase as rapidly as feather size, greatly prolonging the period of feather replacement in large birds.

Susan Brownell, chairperson and professor in the Department of Anthropology and Languages at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, received the Anthology Award in Sport History from the North America Society for Sport History. She was honored for the book, “The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism,” which she edited.

Robert Ricklefs, Curators’ Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri-St Louis, has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award recognizes his lifetime achievements in research and promotes international collaboration in the sciences.