UMSL’s Expanding! 5 Things to Know About UMSL This Week

The lazy days of summer may be in full swing in St. Louis, but students and faculty at the University of Missouri–St. Louis are hardly kicking back.

Here are five highlights of their hard work in this weekly roundup blog posting.

• UMSL is growing! A new student-approved recreation and wellness center sailed through the final approval process. The 94,000-square-foot facility will be built just south of the Millennium Student Center. It’s expected to be completed by fall of 2014. Click HERE to read more about all the amenities.
  
  

• Transportation continues to be a growing cost for area school districts facing annual budget cuts. UMSL doctoral candidates Jeremy North and William Ellegood may have discovered a way to save thousands of dollars on busing and routing for districts. They’ve developed a system for more efficiently transporting students from bus stops to school doors. The pair recently won first place at the Graduate School Research Fair for their project “Applying Business Logistic Optimization Modeling to School Bus Routing.”
  
  

• UMSL music instructor Aurelia Hartenberger has been collecting musical instruments for decades. But, they’re not your average run-of-the-mill ones. They come from all over the world. Now through mid-August, pieces from her collection will be on display at The Sheldon Art Gallery.
  
  

• Each summer, UMSL archaeologist Michael Cosmpoulous leads an expedition of students and volunteers to a dig site in the middle of an olive grove in southwest Greece. Archaeology magazine has written an extensive article about Cosmopoulos’ dig in its July/August issue. Visit the Archaeology website for a preview of the article, titled “The Birth of Bureaucracy” (click on “PREVIEW”).
  
  

• To paraphrase KMOX (1120), you don’t have to travel far from UMSL’s campus to find great summer reading. “The Inverted Forest” by John Dalton, director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at UMSL, made the radio station’s list of “Books by St. Louis authors to read this summer.”

For more comprehensive coverage of the happenings at the University of Missouri–St. Louis visit UMSL Daily.

UMSL is the largest university in the region. More than 16,000 students from 48 states and 62 countries are enrolled with 50,000 additional students enrolled in non-credit continuing education programs. It employs more than 1,400 full-time and part-time teaching and research faculty members. While its graduates have taken leadership roles nationally and internationally, their influence remains centered in the St. Louis region. More than 75 percent of UMSL’s 80,000 graduates still live and work in the region.