As the Dakota Access Pipeline protests turned violent on Labor Day Weekend in 2016, Trisha Etringer was on the frontlines, two months pregnant with her daughter. Faced with the barking dogs of private security guards, Etringer stood up for the rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and was pepper sprayed in the face.
Growing up poor as one of nine children in Indianapolis’ 64th Street neighborhood, Jamie Chidozie learned young the blunt, destructive force of institutionalized racism. Her father, part of the first generation of Blacks in the U.S. to attend college en masse, earned an accounting degree only to be one of dozens of African-Americans who lost their state jobs soon after in a discriminatory purge, she said.
Speech and communication are some of the most basic functions in our everyday lives – and they come so naturally to most, it’s easy to take them for granted.
But what if you weren’t able to communicate, or express your thoughts and ideas effectively? It would be frustrating, and even frightening – and that’s an everyday reality for the millions of people living with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer's and dementia.
A joint art project by students at the University of Northern Iowa and Holmes Junior High School persevered through a global pandemic to convey a message of inclusivity and creativity.
The Iowa Energy Center announced more than $800,000 in grant funding to two University of Northern Iowa projects working to boost energy efficiency in underserved rural areas and educate the next generation about career opportunities in an ever-evolving energy market.
The IEC awarded $418,696 to the Developing an Iowa Energy Curriculum for Secondary Classrooms project proposed by UNI’s Earth and Environmental Sciences department, which will develop and disseminate an energy curriculum for Iowa middle and high school students that incorporates career connections into each topic.
Although COVID-19 has forced students to keep the residence hall doors of Lawther Hall closed, there are still signs of life taped to hallways in the form of small, origami creations of Baby Yoda.
The characters, from the television series “The Mandalorian,” were created during an origami-folding grab-and-go event, one of several efforts of the dorm’s nine resident assistants to bring students together during a global pandemic that is forcing everyone to stay apart.
With early polling locations in the November general election opening next week, college students across the country are preparing to vote, some of them for the first time.
Issues including the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare, the environment and racial justice have made this an election that some are describing as perhaps the most important in a generation. And with an ongoing pandemic, voting will look much different this year.
George Stigler (UNI ’72), who retired July 30 as Iowa’s longest active serving judge and only its second Black district jurist, credits an impromptu hallway chat with two of his University of Northern Iowa professors with changing his life’s course.
“In fall semester of my senior year, I was waiting for class to start in Seerley Hall when Professor Thomas Ryan asked me to come into his office,” recalled Stigler, 70, who earned his bachelor’s degree in History in three-and-a-half years.
She’s a classically trained vocalist who as a grad student co-authored a paper on health issues among Gulf War veterans. Born to a music-teacher mom and college-administrator dad, UNI’s new admissions director Terri Crumley’s life has straddled both worlds in a career that led from The Juilliard School to teaching to admissions posts in Iowa and Wisconsin. Through it all, she kept singing.
As a first-generation, low-income Latino from a single parent household, Jesus Lizarraga-Estrada can relate to the struggles of underrepresented students.
Now the associate director of freshmen recruitment and access at UNI, Lizarraga-Estrada is working to break down the barriers for minoritized populations to access higher education and succeed on campus, and his work landed him on the Waterloo Courier’s “20 under 40” list in 2020.
