It’s not hard to see why Alison Altstatt’s friends call her “the Indiana Jones of medieval manuscripts.”
Though Altstatt may not be fighting Hollywood villains while sporting a fedora, her adventures have taken her around the globe – discovering long lost artifacts of the past.
Her mission: to recover and reassemble the pages of a precious 13th-century musical manuscript – all while balancing a full teaching schedule at the UNI School of Music.
Led by nothing more than the soft glow of their lanterns, a crew of students from the University of Northern Iowa trek into the winding depths of Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota.
Working their way through miles of passageways several hundred feet underground, the air is thick, musty and completely still. Inside the caverns, the dense walls stifle any sound, and seem to absorb the light, leading to an eerie, silent darkness throughout. It feels like exploring a different planet — one that’s completely devoid of any signs of life.
Growing up in rural, landlocked Iowa, Catherine Yeoman never expected to find her passion in marine biology.
But as a junior in the UNI Department of Biology, Yeoman has already managed to kick off a unique college experience that’s brought her around the country – studying bottlenose dolphins in Florida and rehabilitating baby seals in Cape Cod.
As a Waterloo West High School graduate turned University of Northern Iowa football player, Blake Thomas has been a Cedar Valley native his entire life. Thomas wanted to make an impact in the classroom as well as on the field, and he initially decided to pursue a major in biology and pre-med. His intention was to go on to medical school, but that all changed when he took public health courses with Disa Cornish, an associate professor in the health, recreation and community services department.
The dots bounced and collided across the computer screen. Their movement was random, but University of Northern Iowa physics major Madelyn Johnson saw a purpose in the chaos.
The dots were part of a software program that generated random walker simulations, which are often used to represent the interactions of people in the world. And now Johnson and Ali Tabei, an associate professor of physics, are using this software to create a model of how infections spread. It could then be applied to simulate the spread of COVID within a community.
The UNI Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders has welcomed a new addition to their department: baby “Paul.”
Weighing just under two and a half pounds, “Paul” is a preterm infant born at 27 weeks. He has a pulse, real hair, and can breathe and cry.
Paul is not a real infant, though, but rather a top-of-the-line high emotion simulator that students in the department will soon begin using for classwork.
The southeastern states have seen a record-breaking number of hurricanes already make landfall in a year when the nation is also grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. When researchers wanted to know how people would balance the danger of contracting the virus with the need to evacuate their homes, they turned to UNI professor Mark Welford for help. Welford, who heads UNI’s geography department, is also an expert on global pandemics like the medieval Black Death.
The UNI Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders has welcomed a new addition to their department: baby “Paul.”
Weighing just under two and a half pounds, “Paul” is a preterm infant born at 27 weeks. He has a pulse, real hair, and can breathe and cry.
Paul is not a real infant, though, but rather a top-of-the-line high emotion simulator that students in the department will soon begin using for classwork.
Witches have long been part of popular culture, from “Bewitched” to “Charmed” to the countless children knocking on people’s doors dressed as a witch this Halloween. But those modern myths have dark origins of persecution, prosecution and execution. University of Northern Iowa history professor and department head Jennifer McNabb has studied the causes and consequences of witch hunts for years, publishing articles in journals and writing material for textbooks on Western civilization and European history.
