Imagine a place where seasoned university researchers team with nimble young minds to transform old ideas about learning and human development.
DeLTA Center Events
Celebrate the opening of the new DeLTA Center labs and offices in the Lindquist Center
When:
3:30 p.m. Thursday, April 30
Where:
117 Lindquist Center South
The celebration will be followed at 4 p.m. with a presentation by special guest speaker Kate Nation, a professor of psychology from University of Oxford, in the Jones Commons, 300 Lindquist Center North
DeLTA Day - "Learning to Communicate: Theory to Application"
What:
A celebration of ideas and research from the past year
When:
3:30 - 8 p.m. Friday, May 1
Where:
UI Athletic Hall of Fame,
2425 Prairie Meadow Drive, Iowa City
(free parking)
To register, visit here and click on "DelTA Day is May 1, 2015."
Schedule
3:30–4:30 p.m.
Student poster session
4:30–4:45 p.m.
Welcome, Karla McGregor, Director of the DeLTA Center
4:45–6 p.m.
Special guest speaker Kate Nation, University of Oxford, "Learning to Read and Learning to Comprehend"
6–8 p.m.
Dinner
6:30–8 p.m.
Talks by DeLTA members Jun Pablo Hourcade, Amanda Van Horne, and Melissa Duff
Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation in order to participate in either of these programs, contact karla-mcgregor@uiowa.edu in advance or call 319-335-8724.
That's the essence of the DeLTA Center, an interdisciplinary research community at the University of Iowa. Here is where UI professors train the next generation of researchers and work with community partners to address key challenges facing health and education in society today.
On Friday, May 1, the DeLTA Center will recognize research from the past year during its third annual DeLTA Day celebration. The center on Thursday, April 30, is also marking the opening of its new labs and offices in the Lindquist Center.
"The DeLTA Center is a vibrant, grass-roots, intellectual community. Faculty and students participate in DeLTA activities to share new ideas and challenge themselves with new approaches to developmental science," says Karla McGregor, director of the DeLTA Center. "This is our opportunity to celebrate the research that has gone on all year."
The DeLTA Center traces its roots to 1917 with the founding of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS) by Carl Seashore and Cora Hillis. The ICWRS is widely recognized for giving birth to the field of child development.
Today, the DeLTA Center brings together faculty and students from multiple disciplines to explore the complex processes of development and learning. Their research is diverse and ranges from the study of the brain to behaviors and beyond.
This is where Mark Blumberg, a psychology professor at the UI, worked with Alexandre Tiriac, a graduate student, to show sleep twitches activate circuits throughout the developing brain. Thus, teaching newborns about their limbs and what they can do with them.
It is here, too, where Patricia Zebrowski, a professor at the UI's department of communications sciences and disorders in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and graduate student Bryan Brown discovered adolescents who stutter are less likely to relapse if their treatment also addresses their negatives thoughts and feelings about stuttering.
The DeLTA Center is also involved in community events such as workshops to address kindergarten readiness and play fairs that teach the importance of playtime in children's development.
Ultimately, the DeLTA Center focuses on the process of change, recognizing that the processes of development and learning are fundamentally complex.
"There are numerous individual scholars on this campus who are interested in how people change; whether that change is defined as growth, development, adaptation, healing, or learning," McGregor says. "The center enables a synergy that helps these individual scholars accomplish more than they would if they remained in their individual labs, classrooms, and clinics."