Story by Nicole Riehl.
Through his teaching, writing, and outreach, a faculty member strives to create an academic culture that celebrates and explores the experience of disability.
It's been 32 years since Stephen Kuusisto earned his bachelor's degree from Hobart College, a small liberal arts school in New York, but the University of Iowa professor still sports an emerald class ring from his alma mater. Blind since birth, he wears the ring as a reminder of how few individuals with disabilities earn college degrees---a reality he is working to change.
Most of us are aware of our environment in terms of the obvious: the shape of a river, the scent of the air we breathe, the presence or absence of wild creatures. As well, the environmental issues we care the most about exist in the realm of the readily apparent. Our common concerns exist mainly on a tangible scale, ranging from issues of clean, non-polluted water on to such grand matters as global warming. However, the environment we all encounter also exists on a scale so profoundly small that we cannot perceive with our unaided senses. This is the scale of the nanometer, a measurement of things one-billionth of a meter in size.
If government is a parent of academic research, it could also be said that the heart of government is legislation. Creating government policy is a different kind of skill than Sarah England's first discipline, but not one that lies exclusively outside her ken. She is a scientist who perhaps understands better than most how legislation affects the life of the academic researcher since she has placed herself in both worlds, laboring in the familiar neighborhood of her University of Iowa molecular biology lab as well as having written health care policy in the Washington, D.C. office of (then) Senator Hillary Roddam Clinton.
A Life of Productive Research
It may be a human paradox that out of the complex brutality of war are often born beautifully simple and effective treatments that mark the lives of tens of thousands. As a young surgeon serving during the Spanish Civil War, Dr. Ignacio Ponseti learned the value of expedient therapies that transcend conventions. It could be said that his war experience played a part in later shaping the world standard treatment of infant clubfoot that would bear his name, the Ponseti Method, practiced by more than 2000 physicians and technicians in no less than twenty countries. In Ponseti we see the intersection of compassion, intelligence and insight, and a deep awareness of the value of simplicity.
Spain and the Spanish Civil War
Nancy Andreasen has had two professional careers: one very short, the other drawing her down a path toward becoming a neuroscientist and psychiatrist of world importance. These two avenues are expressive of one of the Institute's more interesting minds, one just as capable of exploring the nuances of Renaissance poetry as the complexities of schizophrenia and the mysteries of the creative intellect. Perhaps there is a link between these two lines of thought, since Dr. Andreasen has had an abiding interest in the relationship between the brain and human behavior, and as a scientist has the ability to think in concrete terms when considering the physical, or neurological, basis of why humans act the way they do. Fortunately, Dr.
