Faculty and staff, as you prepare to settle in for the fall semester, here are a few stories you may have missed while enjoying summer.

University of Iowa graduate students Ana-Monica Racila and Serena Gumusoglu have been awarded funding to pursue academic work and lead innovative community projects that empower women and girls. The awards are from the American Association of University Women.

A short film by Michael Gibisser, assistant professor in the University of Iowa Department of Cinematic Arts, will have its world premiere Sept. 6 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

University of Iowa researchers have found that a single bout of exercise benefits older people’s brains. In experiments in which participants aged 60 to 80 exercised once and multiple times, the researchers found some individuals showed improved cognitive functions and working memory.

Mark Berg, director of the University of Iowa Public Policy Center's Crime and Justice Policy Research Program and associate professor in the Department of Sociology, was awarded grant funding for a two-year project titled, “Childhood Stressors and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Adulthood: A Longitudinal Investigation of Divergent Explanatory Models.”

Three Iowa faculty members have been awarded Fulbright grants to conduct research, study, or teach abroad in 2019–20.

A new collaborative project between the University of Iowa and Des Moines Area Community College aims to increase the number of secondary school mathematics teachers from underrepresented communities in Iowa teaching in high-need school districts.

A research team at the University of Iowa has been awarded $750,000 from the U.S. National Science Foundation to develop a natural growth additive in fertilizer that aims to improve crop yields. The researchers, led by Ned Bowden in the Department of Chemistry, will test the growth additive on corn and soybean crops and on a biomass source called Miscanthus grass.

Fred Skiff, professor and chair in Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been appointed to the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee in the U.S Department of Energy's Office of Science. Skiff will advise the DOE in laser and optical plasma diagnostics, and nonlinear dynamics of plasmas.

University of Iowa biologists have traced the evolutionary origin of genes associated with a key enzyme involved in regulating metabolism in eukaryotes, which include all living organisms other than bacteria. The findings were published earlier this month in the journal PLOS One.

The University of Iowa School of Social Work has added a master class as a follow-up to the popular Creative Writing Seminar for Social Workers, which has provided writing courses for 29 years.

Dana Thomann, lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric, collaborated with Academic Support and Retention to start a pilot program that embeds peer tutors in rhetoric classrooms. The goal is to use peer support to improve student learning, and the results so far are promising.