News | St. Louis Magazine | October 2025

New Public Exchange will put WashU profs to work on St. Louis’ most pressing problems

The Brown School initiative is modeled on a first-of-its-kind program at USC that’s had a big impact.

What if you could pull expertise out of the ivory tower and deploy it in the real world? What if top St. Louis academics were encouraged to direct their attention to the region’s problems not as a subject of historical inquiry but in real time? 

Those are the questions being asked by a new initiative launching today at Washington University’s Brown School, and it’s already working to help St. Louis recover from one of its most challenging springs in recent memory. Called the Public Exchange, it was inspired by an initiative at the University of Southern California that’s had a big impact over its five years in Los Angeles. 

USC’s exchange describes itself as “the first-of-its-kind matchmaker and A-to-Z project manager that enables partners working on complex problems to tap the entire spectrum of academic expertise at a world-class research university.” The Brown School’s dean, Dorian Traube, came to WashU from USC, where she worked with its Public Exchange as an investigator on a project. She says the idea of creating an exchange here—the second in the nation after USC’s—had been on her mind from the beginning. In fact, she approached WashU’s provost to pitch her on the idea during her first month in St. Louis. 

“Because I came here and I saw this city that, I think, has struggled for a while,” she says, “but has all of this amazing infrastructure and is so influential, in the heart of the United States. I knew it could be a connector and a conduit if the right infrastructure was in place.”