Not long after receiving the largest research award in its history, the University of Iowa welcomed top officials from NASA, who toured Iowa facilities and lauded the meaningful work being done by researchers and students.

Jim Bridenstine, the top administrator of NASA, and other high-ranking representatives from the space agency, visited the University of Iowa to learn about Iowa's legacy in space exploration and involvement in current NASA-funded missions, including TRACERS, a $115 million NASA contact award to Iowa — the largest in school history.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have won $3.5 million from NASA to launch two rockets in late 2021 that will study electrical currents between the Earth’s magnetosphere and an active, upper layer of its atmosphere that can yield auroras.

Jane Huffman, grants and funding manager for the Iowa Youth Writing Project, was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

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.