Vanessa Miller

Five years after lawmakers denied Iowa State University the full $100 million it sought for a new and updated Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory – which underpins Iowa’s $32.5 billion dollar animal agriculture industry and aids in animal health emergencies, like the bird flu – Gov. Kim Reynolds on Tuesday committed another $40 million to the new lab.

Although just 39 percent of Americans 65 and older have had both the initial COVID vaccine series plus an updated bivalent booster against the omicron strain, new University of Iowa-involved research shows “significant protection” from that bivalent shot among those older adults.

Iowa State University, which begins developing the $200 million CyTown entertinament district this spring, is looking for vendors, retailers and restaurants to eventually fill out the regional destination.

For the first time in more than a decade, Iowa’s 15 community colleges in the last full academic year saw a collective bump in credit-seeking students — although the total number of hours they took continued to fall, sustaining a trend of students taking lighter course loads.

The Cedar-Rapids based community college confirmed Thursday it’s moving most of its operations from that facility to its regional center in Coralville.

Iowa’s university and college campuses this month are planning a host of lectures, activities, and events to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and his National Day of Service — including Iowa State University, featuring a lecture from a civil rights leader arrested for climbing a South Carolina State House pole in 2015 to remove its Confederate flag.

A Le Claire mother is suing the state, accusing University of Iowa physicians of perforating her bowel and charring her rectum during a surgical procedure – leaving her permanently impaired and unable to care for her two sons to the same degree she was pre-surgery.

Iowa’s Board of Regents on Tuesday will conduct mid-year performance reviews of their university presidents, who over the last year have faced a range of high-profile issues and challenges -- like the transition from pandemic-era restrictions, free speech on campus, and hundreds of millions in new facilities and upgrades.

While many features of 21st century journalism would be unrecognizable to publishers more than a century ago, many of its tenets and objectives remain the same: to tell the truth, inform readers, connect communities, and enrich lives – while holding leaders and officials accountable and providing a public forum for questions, criticism, and compromise.

Though a University of Iowa urology professor’s lawsuit against a UI law professor is continuing, it’s doing so absent a federal First Amendment complaint. That ruling came this week after the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that law professor Marc Linder didn’t act as the state when slamming expert testimony from urologist James Brown.

“That's a whole different level of stress on an already stressful situation,” University of Iowa Dr. Christopher Hogrefe told The Gazette, pulling from personal experience as a current assistant physician for the Chicago Cubs.

Although the University of Iowa stripped orthopedics from its second application to build a new hospital in North Liberty – after critics of the first, denied application slammed its focus on orthopedics and state officials cited the heavy orthopedics bent in its rejection – UI Health Care officials now are calling the project an “orthopedic hospital.”

Although a Republican-led effort last year to change the way Iowa funds its public universities didn’t materialize, the concept isn’t dead — as lawmakers are airing plans to revisit the idea in the upcoming session in their debate over how much to give the state institutions.

Given low-dose CT scans are available and capable of detecting lung cancer early, the University of Iowa’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center recently joined more than 50 top cancer organizations in urging providers and insurers to improve access to and more frequently use lung cancer screening tools for those at high risk.

Fast forward a decade, and what once confined Petrucci now compels her as a fall 2022 UI graduate with a newly-minted PhD in neuroscience and plans to continue her epilepsy research as a post-doctoral student at the University of Utah.