A recently launched student record system that was custom built by software engineers in Information Technology Services got a good workout in the first week of classes, and is performing extremely well. Fall of 2013 marked the first full-blown start-of-semester experience for the fully implemented system.

Several University of Iowa faculty are available to the media to discuss the economic impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, five years later.

Building on the success of its first high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, the UI is now building a second “supercomputer” that will be available to researchers early next year. The Board of Regents, State of Iowa on Wednesday approved the purchase of the new system, which will significantly boost the university’s HPC capacity from 3,700 to 6,132 processor cores.

Priya Pennathur, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has received $671,951 for a three-year research project from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, to understand and model how health care providers create, use, and transform health information in their work.

UI sociologist Michael Sauder participates in a discussion about the history of higher education, including controversies surrounding college rankings at the turn of the 20th century.

UI junior Sarah Holm is working with the IPIG on a campaign to encourage more professors to replace expensive textbooks with journal articles or open textbooks, a resource that provides certain books for free online with print versions costing around 80 percent less than a traditional textbook.

In the first week of classes alone, the Information Technology Services Help Desk assisted nearly 5,600 faculty, staff, and students with technology questions—about 3½ times the volume of a typical week in the semester.

The UI’s Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC) and the City of Muscatine are launching a partnership focusing on key projects for the city’s long-term sustainability. Students in art, business, engineering, public health, rhetoric, and urban planning will work under the direction of UI faculty and Muscatine leaders.

The Pentacrest will be a busy place on Thursday, Sept. 12 as two campus events will take place near the Old Capitol.

UI engineering professor Ibrahim Ozbolat describes how researchers are making progress towards creating human organs with techniques such as 3D printing, using the patient’s own cells for ink.

UI Pharmaceuticals has landed a deal to manufacture a commercial drug for the U.S. market after UI pharmacists found the right mixing order for the drug to be produced at mass scale.

Pamela Bourjaily, the director of the Frank Business Communications Center, says the pronunciation program was developed as an effort to better respect Chinese students and encourage a more comfortable environment in the classroom, for both the Chinese and domestic community.