University of Iowa

Spencer Cooper-Ohm, who received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, and English and creative writing from the University of Iowa in May 2024, is the winner of a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award to Kosovo for 2024-25.

19 students have been named recipients of the Stanley Award of International Research. The awards are given annually to outstanding students in all academic fields for the pursuit of foreign research, learning activities in international studies, and career interests abroad.

More than 100 current University of Iowa students to participate in the 2023 Spring Undergraduate Research Festival, an event staged annually by the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates.

Valeria Cota is a first-generation college student from a large family, most of whom live in either Iowa or Mexico. She's also completing her fourth year as a graduate student in Associate Professor Nicole Brogden's lab, which focuses on the use of microneedles to improve drug delivery through the skin. Notably, Cota is a recipient of a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) Kirschstein National Research Service Award Pre-Doctoral F31 Fellowship - an "extremely prestigious award and notoriously challenging to get," according to Brogden, Cota's major professor.

Alan Carrillo, a doctoral candidate in Art History and recipient of the Graduate College's Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship, uses digital modeling to reconstruct seminal medieval architecture lost to time. It was his interest in the Middle Ages that brought him into the field of Art History.

A fascination with electronic devices and photonics - or the science of light - has led Jacob Sindt down a promising path of research and discovery as an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa College of Engineering.

Fifth-year Biomedical Engineering PhD student Mallory Tollefson is imagining the possibilities of personalized medicine. And when she says personalized, she means it. She envisions a future where patients diagnosed as deaf would get their genomes sequenced so that she and other researchers could "identify variants that are unique to their genetics."

A new student-led study from the University of Iowa College of Public Health examines the role that user-generated content on the social media platform TikTok plays in promoting Puff Bar culture. Puff Bar is a brand of disposable e-cigarette available in flavors that appeal to youth.

Undergraduate students at the University of Iowa not only have plentiful opportunities to work alongside faculty researchers, they make important contributions to science.

Hannah Zadeh, a first-year PhD student in the University of Iowa's Sociology and Criminology department, is already challenging people to rethink medical research's presumed impartiality. "I think we sometimes look at medical research and data as a sort of impenetrable black box," they explained, "and certainly it is very valuable, but it's also important I think to come at it in a lot of different ways critically." For Zadeh, that means delving into the biases behind seemingly objective clinical algorithms, especially as they relate to race.

Sociology and Criminology graduate student, Kendall Riley, has witnessed firsthand the profound affects incarceration has on families while tutoring a child whose parents oscillated in and out of prison. She recognized how incarceration can drastically alter one's life trajectory, especially the lives of Black children and families. This experience pushed Riley into her current doctoral research where she explores how the legal system can affect a multitude of health outcomes.

Samantha Kruse's research interests are incredibly specific, yet they promise large-scale impacts. A second-year graduate student in the University of Iowa's chemistry department, Kruse is researching how radiation impacts organic materials, or as she described it, "incorporat[ing] my two loves in the area of chemistry: organic solid-state chemistry and radio chemistry."

Nine University of Iowa students and recent graduates were named recipients of the highly-competitive Graduate Research Fellowship Program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Greta Becker, a Doctor of Medicine student at UI Carver College of Medicine, is the winner of a Fulbright Study/Research grant in Public Health to Vietnam for 2022-23.

Camellia Pham, a University of Iowa student graduating in May 2022 with a BA in comparative literature Asian languages and literature (Chinese) and a 2021 recipient of a Stanley Undergraduate Award for International Research to conduct research in China, took an unconventional, yet effective, path to completing her research project. Though COVID-19 impacted her plans to travel to China, she persevered and used resources both here at the university and connections abroad to conduct her research and utilize her findings when applying to PhD and master's programs across the country.

Anna Correa, a graduate student who will receive a Master of Public Health in community and behavior health from the University of Iowa in May 2022, is the winner of a Fulbright Study/Research grant in Public Health to India for 2022-23.

McKenzie Toma is a winner of a Fulbright study/research grant in creative writing. She will travel to Romania after graduating with an MFA in creative writing (poetry) in May.

Fourth-year pharmaceutics graduate student Jackson Russo sees poloxamers as an opportunity to more effectively treat chronic wounds like bedsores and diabetic ulcers.

In a new study, physicists led by the University of Iowa report a new feature to Earth's atmospheric light show. Examining video taken nearly two decades ago, the researchers describe multiple instances where a section of the diffuse aurora-the faint, background-like glow accompanying the more vivid light commonly associated with auroras-goes dark, as if scrubbed by a giant blotter. Then, after a short period of time, the blacked-out section suddenly reappears.

A soon-to-be published study co-authored by Min Zhang, graduate student in informatics, finds that companies can find ideas for innovative new products in the consumer review sections on e-commerce websites like Amazon. The review sections are essentially free focus groups where consumers can leave ideas for new or improved products, says Weiguo Fan, professor of business analytics in the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business and study co-author. Finding those nuggets of consumer wisdom can be a challenge, though. Few companies have the resources to sift through thousands of comments across dozens of e-commerce sites, only a small number of which offer any kind of information that could be used for product innovation.

University of Iowa undergraduate students Terry Saul III and Hannah Zadeh are working with Iowa faculty and staff to increase the accessibility and usability of nearly a half-million pages of emails related to the Flint water crisis.

The Speculative Literature Foundation recently announced University of Iowa graduate student Tatiana Schlote-Bonne the winner of its 2020 Diverse Worlds Grant. Schlote-Bonne was honored for her work "The Afterlife Memoirs." She is a second year MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program inside Iowa's Department of English.

Danny Tallon is serious about space. After all, he'd love to go there. Tallon, an undergraduate physics major at the University of Iowa, studies supernovas, which are exploding stars hundreds of billions of light years from Earth. The junior from Mondamin, Iowa, is a published author on two scientific papers that describe the curious behavior of a type of supernova whose explosions defy what physicists think should be happening.