Three University of Iowa students alumnae have been awarded Fulbright U.S. Student Program grants to conduct research internationally in 2013-14. This year's UI recipients are Margaret Ross, Rebecca McCray, and Briana Smith.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It is designed to increase understanding between people of the United States and other countries by providing participants opportunities to study, teach, conduct research, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

Thomas Langer, a senior at the University of Iowa studying International Studies and Human Rights (CLAS), traveled to India last summer to conduct research for his Honors Thesis. While there, he met an unexpected visitor whose personal story of struggle and success moved Thomas beyond words and affirmed his academic ambitions.

Faculty members in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages at the University of Iowa have received a $90,000 grant from STARTALK, a unit of the federal National Security Language Initiative, for their program “Bridging the Gap through Standards and Technology: STARTALK for Teachers.” The program provides unique professional training for teachers of Russian as a foreign language in the United States.

This is the second grant received by this team—Irina Kostina, UI lecturer; Anna Kolesnikova, UI visiting professor; and Marina Kostina, CEO of Wired @ Heart—from STARTALK for the development of their teacher-preparation program.

If University of Iowa students ever feel like they don’t have a voice, here’s proof that they do.

After much clamoring by students, faculty, staff and community members against the impending closure of UI’s Center for Human Rights, university officials announced Wednesday a new permanent home for the center in the College of Law beginning July 1.

You would think by having a waterproof, shockproof camera that your pictures would be safe. Well, not from a little girl who doesn’t read English. With the pressing of just a few buttons she managed to delete the 1,000 pictures documenting a month of my time in Nicaragua. Luckily, I found a program to retrieve photos that have been deleted from a memory card and I am thankful that, in my whole summer of traveling, that incident was the closest thing that could be considered a disaster.

University of Iowa President Sally Mason, in her recent interview with the DI editors, discussed the future or, more precisely, the elimination of the UI Center for Human Rights as we have known it.

She spoke of the university's budget difficulties and suggested that closing the center would "save some money." She also argued that the provost's plan to parcel out a couple of the center's programs to other academic units was "perfectly appropriate" and would enable the work of the center to continue "in a different capacity."

Jeannette George, a Nursing and International Studies (CLAS) major with an emphasis in African studies, has been studying at the University of Iowa since 2009. Last summer, she made the life-changing decision to pursue her academic research of Sickle Cell Anemia awareness far beyond her UI classrooms. Here is her reflection on her research, her decision to travel to Uganda, and why she will never regret it.