Author: Abigail Klein

A live faculty and staff town hall will be held 2-3 p.m. today, Oct. 1 via YouTube. This event is an opportunity to listen to and interact with President Rick Muma and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Shirley Lefever. The event will be moderated by Gabriel Fonseca, University Staff Senate president; and Whitney Bailey, Faculty Senate president.

Faculty and staff who participate can ask questions during the live chat YouTube stream. For participants who don’t have a YouTube account, follow the link below to create one. Creating an account will help facilitate questions in the live chat section of the Virtual Town Hall.

Innovation partners are asked to encourage children in grades 6-12 to submit designs for a CubeSat mission patch. The CubeSat (a tiny satellite) will be flown during a mission to collect data as part of Dr. Nickolas Solomey’s research on solar neutrinos.

The contest is a partnership between Wichita State and the Ad Astra Kansas Foundation. More information about the contest and the entry form can be found at the Ad Astra Kansas Foundation website. All entries are due Nov. 12.

A new Wichita State University mental health clinic is helping its clients take a positive and proactive approach to their mental health. The WSU Integrated Support and Empowerment (WISE) Clinic offers comprehensive counseling services to everyone in the Wichita community, and all services are free of charge.

The purpose of the clinic is twofold: First, it engages the community and neighborhoods surrounding Wichita State and empowers people to take control of their mental health; and secondly, it gives WSU counseling students the opportunity for real-world applied learning through their work with clients.

Wichita State University has been chosen to host the 2023 Science Olympiad National Tournament, bringing national STEM notoriety to the university and up to 7,000 visitors and tourists to Wichita.

Approximately 1,800 students from across the United States, Canada and Japan will travel to Wichita State May 18-20, 2023, for the Science Olympiad National Tournament.

Wichita State University will participate in Festi-Ful — one of the nation’s largest street food festivals, taking place across 300 U.S. colleges and universities — 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24 at 2020 Perimeter Road by Shocker Hall on the WSU campus.

Festi-Ful is the first signature event from Chartwells’ Joy-Ful program, a year-long campaign aimed at welcoming students back to campus in a memorable way after a year of campus closures because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone is welcome to attend the event.

The show must go on, and thanks to Wichita State’s Molecular Diagnostics Lab (MDL), Music Theatre Wichita (MTW) has been able to keep its doors open to audiences.

MDL has registered, partnered with and trained more than 500 organizations, schools, health care facilities, and businesses throughout the region to collect COVID-19 specimens for PCR testing. Test results are generally available within 24 hours, allowing for quick and precise quarantine and treatment for those who test positive. The testing provided through MDL has been critical to the pandemic fight in Kansas.

What started as one woman’s passion project has flourished into a literacy empire that serves thousands of children in schools across the Wichita area — helped along the way by the people and services of Wichita State University.

Prisca Barnes founded Storytime Village in 2009 with a mission “to inspire a lifelong love of reading for underserved Kansas children from birth to age 8.”

A Wichita State University scientist is part of a team that has been awarded a five-year, $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further research a treatment for COVID-19.

Dr. Bill Groutas, medicinal chemist at Wichita State University, is working with Dr. Kyeong-Ok “KC” Chang, a virologist at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine; Dr. Yunjeong Kim, a veterinary virologist at Kansas State; Dr. Stanley Perlman, professor of microbiology and immunology from the University of Iowa; and Dr. Scott Lovell, a structural biologist at the University of Kansas. Chang is the principal investigator

A Wichita State University student has wielded her love of nature into an internship with one of the nation’s leading outdoors companies.

Maria Jimenez — a junior studying industrial engineering in Wichita State’s Industrial, Systems and Manufacturing Engineering Department — spent her summer interning with White River Marine Group, a co-op of Bass Pro Shop. For her, the chance to work for the company was an extension of not only her skills, but also her love of all things outdoors.

Today is the last day for Wichita State students to apply for a $250 COVID vaccine incentive award or a chance to receive one of 20 scholarships worth $5,000 each for the spring 2022 semester. To qualify, students must meet the following guidelines:

• Students must have received their first dose of the vaccine before Sept. 17.
• All vaccine documentation needs to be submitted and uploaded to the myShockerhealth patient portal before Oct. 8.

Students can submit all questions about vaccine incentives via myShockerHealth portal.