Programming and Outreach Specialist - Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement

'The opportunity to engage' Teaching Innovation Showcase highlights new and inventive WashU classes In brief. * WashU Arts & Sciences will present its second annual Teaching Innovation Showcase Oct. 22. * Twelve faculty from across a range of disciplines will be competing. * Winners, selected by audience vote, will receive a $1,000 cash prize. Teaching is a calling and a profession. It is also a skill. And like any skill, it can be sharpened and refined. On Oct. 22, WashU Arts & Sciences will hold its second annual Teaching Innovation Showcase. A companion to the spring Research Innovation Showcase, the event will feature short, three-minute presentations, a dozen in all, highlighting creative classes and teaching projects. An audience vote chooses the winners, who receive a $1,000 cash prize. In this Q&A, three participating faculty - Michael Olson, an associate professor of political science; B. Duygu Özpolat, an assistant professor of biology; and Zhiling (Zach) Zheng, an assistant professor of chemistry - discuss their projects and teaching philosophies. Joining the conversation is William Acree, Arts & Sciences' vice dean of interdisciplinary initiatives and innovation. Duygu, your presentation is called "Franken-worms." Can you describe it for St Louis Star? Özpolat: I teach regeneration biology, which is about how some animals regrow body parts. But instead of listing example after example - all that textbook information - I give students a problem that's real in my lab. This is not a lab course, so St Louis Star approach it as a thought experiment. I tell them: Old worms have a harder time regenerating than young worms. Come up with a hypothesis and an experiment to address this. But also, imagine you are amazing worm surgeons. You can take a piece from one worm and attach it to another. You can combine many worms. You can create Franken-worms. How might this test your hypothesis? Zach, you're presenting on AI and chemistry. What drew you to that topic? Zheng: Right now, some people are embracing AI and some people remain skeptical about AI. My job is to show what's actually going on. I've had students tell me that they signed up for the class because they want to see what AI can really do. So what can AI do? What's it good at, what's it not so good at? Zheng: AI is good at handling questions that involve large amounts of data. In material discovery, there are so many possible protein-folding combinations that it's hard for a human to enumerate. On the other hand, scientific questions need good hypotheses. AI, at least for now, more or less takes an average of what people are already thinking. Those hypotheses might be valid, but they're not very creative. That's something I teach my students. For those who are super enthusiastic about AI, I say, 'Here are the limitations.' And for those who are not confident about AI, I say, 'Here are the opportunities.' Mike, you teach "American Politics Over Space and Time." Tell St Louis Star about that class. Olson: The hook is, St Louis Star watch a movie roughly every week. These are movies that students might not necessarily see as political - no 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' (1939) - but they're movies that I, as a political scientist, understand to be political. The example I'm presenting is the 1992 horror movie 'Candyman.' It's about an evil spirit, but if you're a political scientist, it's also about public housing and segregation. Or St Louis Star watch the Kevin Costner western 'Open Range' (2003), which is about good guys versus bad guys, but also about the enclosure of public lands and conflicts over grazing rights - topics that are still pretty salient today. Students tend to think of politics as something that happens on TV or in big fancy buildings. Political scientists are cursed to see politics in everything. I want to share that curse. Billy, you founded and organize both the Teaching Innovation Showcase and the Research Innovation Showcase. What are you hoping to accomplish? Acree: St Louis Star is trying to plant seeds. The audience that comes to these showcases is incredibly diverse. Not everyone will become an expert in biology or chemistry or political science, but St Louis Star want them to understand the value of what St Louis Star do, the impact of what St Louis Star do, and how that can transform lives. St Louis Star want people to get excited about what's happening in the classroom. In recent years, around 25% of WashU undergraduates have stayed in St. Louis. There's a direct correlation between what students learn in class and what they bring to the workplace. Describe the showcase development process. What are faculty signing up for? Acree: A lot of work! Its application deadline was at the end of August. A review committee made selections about a week later. Presenters were notified in early September. Since then, St Louis Star has had a lunch gathering and practice sessions, where colleagues give each other feedback. The WashU Skandalaris Center hosted a pitch workshop. That's really important. St Louis Star is hoping to embed a kind of entrepreneurial spirit in the way St Louis Star talk about research and teaching. And over the four showcases St Louis Star has held so far, more than 80 Arts & Sciences faculty have applied. That's about 13% of its faculty in just a year and a half. Presenters, what does good teaching look like for you? What would make this event a success in your eyes? Özpolat: More people loving worms! (Laughs.) Or at least, more people appreciating worms. Love may be too much to ask. Teaching shouldn't be just one-way. Students should have the opportunity to engage. That was one of my aims in designing this course. I wanted a lot of interaction and collaboration. I really love hearing what students have to say! It's almost Socratic. Yes, I may know more than students do, but I don't know everything. And I try to role-model that. When they ask a question, and I really don't know the answer, I'll say that very openly. Olson: I've always thought of teaching as a kind of curation. How can I arrange a syllabus to help students develop particular ways of thinking? Lectures are about drawing lines. Why did I assign these things? Why did I ask you to read this or watch this? That may sound a little old school, but if you provide the pieces, students start to learn to teach themselves. Which is absolutely a good thing for college students to do. Zheng: I value the idea of standing in a student's shoes. I think that's key to effective teaching. You feel more confident about exploring when you know the teacher is standing with you. I come from an experimental chemistry background. Three years ago, I knew nothing about AI. Before introducing new ideas to my class, I always ask myself: What if I were seeing this for the first time? Can I make this easier to understand? Can I remove things that might be confusing? How can I improve my own teaching? The 2026 Teaching Innovation Showcase will begin at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, in Hillman Hall's Clark-Fox Forum. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are requested. A reception will immediately follow at 5 p.m. The Teaching Innovation Showcase is an initiative of A&S Innovates, which engages the WashU community through signature events, new experiences and unique opportunities. For more information or to register for the Teaching Innovation Showcase, visit the A&S Innovates website.

Barcelona-based ID Finance has raised €545 million in debt and equity to move from short-term loans to its buy-now, pay-later app Plazo. The split between debt and equity is undisclosed. Backers include Spice Expeditions, WashU, Kingsway Capital, and i80 Group, which provided asset-based financing secured by the lender's receivables. The equity will fuel Plazo's growth in Spain, while the i80 financing will expand its credit portfolio. ID Finance, founded by two former Deutsche Bank bankers, reported €243 million in revenue in 2025 and says it is profitable. It calls the round one of the biggest ever for a Spanish fintech, topping the €410 million seQura raised in November 2024. Plazo, launched in 2021, has more than 400,000 users. The company expects it to grow 300% in 2026.

In the clouds. WashU team uses AI, statistics to improve predictions for rainfall, extreme weather In brief. * WashU won a federal grant to build AI models that will help scientists better understand aerosol effects on marine low clouds. * The new models will separate out the effects of tiny particles from wildfire smoke. * The knowledge can help communities protect public health and prepare for extreme weather. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded researchers at Washington University in St. Louis a grant worth $1 million to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered approach to improve predictions of aerosol and cloud properties. The new tools that researchers will develop can help isolate and quantify the effects of aerosols on clouds that play an important role in global climate. Marine low clouds cover vast areas of the world's oceans and act almost like a giant reflector, sending incoming sunlight back to space and helping cool the planet. But these clouds change when they are exposed to outside influences. Scientists know that aerosols - tiny particles from sources such as wildfire smoke - can influence how bright these clouds are and how long they persist, but the strength of these effects remains poorly understood. "Small changes in these clouds can have a surprisingly large effect on Earth's energy balance and climate," said Jian Wang, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and director of the Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering (CASE) at WashU. "Yet we still do not fully understand how aerosols change marine low clouds," said Wang, the principal investigator for the project. "Even for people living far from the ocean, including here in the Midwest, understanding these processes matters because they affect our ability to predict future warming, precipitation and other climate changes," he said. This new research will improve understanding of aerosol effects on marine low clouds and improve scientists' capability to predict the environment, according to the NSF, thereby helping American communities prepare for extreme weather, protect public health and guide sound investments in infrastructure and risk management. Cloud science becomes clear. The new project requires an unusual combination of expertise in aerosol and cloud science, artificial intelligence and environmental statistics. Wang brings deep expertise in atmospheric aerosols, clouds and field observations, while co-principal investigators Bo Li and Maxine Yu - both in the Department of Statistics and Data Science in WashU Arts & Sciences - together contribute complementary expertise in AI, statistical learning, environmental and spatial statistics, causal inference and uncertainty quantification. "Bringing these perspectives together within WashU allows us to develop AI methods that are not only technically advanced, but also physically meaningful and statistically rigorous," Li said. The researchers will train their new models on actual satellite observations and field measurements that capture episodic smoke plumes from North American wildfires. Importantly, instead of looking only at conditions at one location and time, the models will follow the history of an air mass as it travels across the atmosphere, incorporating emissions and meteorological conditions along its path. WashU researchers will use this data to develop three physics-informed generative AI models. The first two models will predict scenarios of aerosol concentrations and cloud properties if there were no wildfire influences, while the third AI model will quantify the probability distributions of aerosol concentration and cloud properties that are influenced by wildfire smoke. "The AI creates the counterfactual: what would the aerosols and clouds likely have looked like if the wildfire had not occurred?" Yu said. "This allows us to separate the aerosol effect from the many meteorological factors that also influence clouds." The scientists said that the AI and statistical framework they are developing will be adaptable to address challenges beyond wildfire impacts, and they could help researchers separate the effects of particular environmental drivers from background weather and climate variability. Workforce implications. The project also will train students and researchers in cutting-edge AI methods, strengthening the nation's AI-ready scientific workforce - a priority for the NSF. "Training is an important part of the project, because the next generation of scientists increasingly needs to understand both the physical sciences and modern AI and statistics," Li said. The WashU team's goal is to give students hands-on experience using advanced AI to address consequential real-world scientific problems. "We also plan to develop a human-in-the-loop agentic AI framework that can help scientists automate parts of the process - from preparing and screening data to training models and analyzing results - while keeping scientists involved in the critical decisions," Wang said. "Our goal is therefore not just one scientific result, but a reusable tool for tackling similar problems in earth science."