Events

Study Hall

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 10:00am to 12:00pm

University of Iowa Museum of Natural History

The Museum of Natural History welcomes students each week for a study session in our galleries. We'll provide the snacks, cushions, and ambiance. You bring your planners, textbooks, or assignments. Together, we'll stay ahead of our goals this semester.

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Liz Kozik (Chicago Botanic Garden) - "Doing and Drawing Prairie Science: Scicomm as Scientiﬁc Practice in Urban Ecology "

Thursday, September 17, 2026 3:30pm

Macbride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Thursday, 9/17/26, 3:30pm, 255 MacBride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Liz Kozik (Chicago Botanic Garden)

"Doing and Drawing Prairie Science: Scicomm as Scientiﬁc Practice in Urban Ecology "

For science to make an impact, we have to ﬁgure out how to share the work we’re doing with a wider public. That’s why Dr. Liz Anna Kozik centers visual scicomm as a major pillar of her work as a Research Scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. She will share how she got here, what she does...

PhD Thesis Defense - Samuel Hudziak -

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 8:00am

Trowbridge Hall

September 22, 2026 - 8AM, 231 Trowbridge Hall (TH)

The general audience will be invited to leave after the presentation and Q & A session.

Title: Eruptive Chronology and Plagioclase Geochemistry of the Saunders Ash, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

Abstract: The Saunders Ash is an anomalously thick volcanic deposit preserved more than 12 km from its inferred source at Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand. Its age, eruptive origin and relationship to Taranaki’s evolving magmatic plumbing system have remained...

Study Hall

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 10:00am to 12:00pm

University of Iowa Museum of Natural History

Maker Break: Fold Into Fall – An Origami Leaf Craft

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 11:30am to 1:00pm

Sciences Library

Drop in anytime for a fun, themed craft that takes just 10–20 minutes and explore your creativity.

All Majors Career Fair

Thursday, September 24, 2026 11:00am to 4:00pm

Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

This job and internship fair will focus on recruiting students in ALL MAJORS! Typically about 100+ employers attend and 1,000+ students attend!

Visit careers.uiowa.edu/all-majors-career-fair for more details.

Creating Citations with EndNote

Thursday, September 24, 2026 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Seamans Center

Build your scholarly toolkit with this workshop on citation management with EndNote.

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Bill Arnold (Dept. of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering, University of Minnesota)

Thursday, September 24, 2026 3:30pm

Macbride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Thursday, 9/24/26, 3:30pm, 255 MacBride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Bill Arnold (Dept. of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering, University of Minnesota)

Talk: TBD

Mastodon Exhibit Ribbon Cutting at Prairie Trails Museum | Corydon, IA

Saturday, September 26, 2026 10:00am

Prairie Trails Museum of Wayne County

The Prairie Trails Museum of Wayne County in Corydon, IA, is hosting a ribbon cutting for their new mastodon exhibit during their Fall Pioneer Festival on September 26. The ribbon cutting is at noon, but festivities start at 10am.

Introduction to Spatial Data Science with Jinyi Cai

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 1:00pm to 3:00pm

Virtual

Many social science questions have a spatial dimension. Exploring spatial patterns can help researchers generate hypotheses about how geography shapes social and environmental processes in their studies. This workshop is for beginners to learn a practical workflow for exploring spatial patterns of socio-demographic and environmental data. Through a hands-on case study, participants will retrieve socio-demographic data through the U.S. Census API and integrate it with spatial datasets. They will then use interactive visualization to explore geographic patterns and apply spatial statistical methods to identify spatial clusters, where nearby areas have similar values, and spatial outliers, where locations differ from their neighbors. Participants will learn to conduct these analyses in Google Colab using Jupyter notebooks based on Python. The cloud-based environment allows them to run analyses and scale computation on large datasets without local software installation. Basic familiarity with Python is helpful but not required.

Study Hall

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 10:00am to 12:00pm

University of Iowa Museum of Natural History

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Michael Manuel Sori (Purdue)

Thursday, October 1, 2026 3:30pm

Macbride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Thursday, 10/1/26, 3:30pm, 255 MacBride Hall

SEES:7000 Colloquium - Michael Manuel Sori, Purdue

Talk: TBD

Art & Write Night

Friday, October 2, 2026 6:00pm to 8:00pm

University of Iowa Museum of Natural History

Join the long, rich, historical tradition of artists creating in our spaces.

Professional, aspiring, and amateur artists alike, make our museum your muse. The return of this popular program series welcomes guests into the Museum of Natural History's magical gallery spaces after-hours to work on sketching or writing projects with other campus and community artists.

Tell a friend, grab a notebook, and join us on the first Friday of each month. We'll provide a new inspo prompt for each session and...

Intermediate Spatial Data Science and GeoAI with Dr. Caglar Koylu

Tuesday, October 6, 2026 1:00pm to 3:00pm

Social Sciences Research Building

Many social, environmental, and health processes exhibit spatial patterns. Nearby places may be related, and relationships between variables may vary across locations. When these spatial patterns are ignored, key assumptions of traditional statistical methods can be violated, leading to biased or misleading results.

This workshop introduces concepts and methods in spatial statistics and GeoAI for analyzing such patterns and relationships. Participants will learn about spatial dependence, where nearby observations tend to be related, and spatial heterogeneity and non-stationarity, where relationships between variables vary across space. Through a hands-on case study, participants will use mapping and spatial statistical methods to identify these patterns.

The workshop will also introduce XGBoost as a machine-learning approach for modeling complex and nonlinear relationships and use SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) to interpret how different variables contribute to model predictions in the social, environmental, and health sciences.

Analyses will be conducted in Python using Google Colab. Some familiarity with quantitative data analysis and spatial data science is encouraged. Prior experience with machine learning or programming is not required.