Author: Abigail Klein

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. To highlight the importance of this month, President Rick Muma is encouraging students, faculty and staff to engage with Wichita State’s nationally recognized Suspenders4Hope Preventing Suicide training. The training helps amplify efforts at WSU to reduce the stigma around mental health and to normalize treatment.

Watch the video to learn more about the benefits of the Suspenders4Hope training

Students, faculty and staff are invited to the fall 2022 Academic Convocation beginning at 9:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 8 at Wilner Auditorium. Doors will open at 9 a.m. Academic Convocation is the official academic welcome for all first-year students. This event celebrates new Shockers’ entry into higher education and inducts them into a community of learners.

This event is free and open to the entire campus community.

This event will feature director of Engagement Naquela Pack, the speaker pro-tempore of the Student Senate and Underserved Senator Gregory VanDyke Jr., and keynote speaker Kwame Onwuachi, author of the 2022 Common Read book “Notes from a Young Black Chef.”

All 2022 University Faculty Award winners will also be recognized at the event. A reception and book signing will immediately follow at 10:30 a.m. on the second floor of the Ulrich Museum of Art gallery, with an informal question-and-answer session with Onwuachi at 11:30 a.m. at Shocker Dining Hall.

Space is limited for this event. For additional information and a full list of speakers visit, www.wichita.edu/convocation.

To learn more about Wichita State’s Common Read, visit https://wichita.edu/commonread.

Whether you’ve walked the paths of WSU recently, long ago or only through the eyes of others, you are a valuable part of the university’s story. This is a place where the past stands side by side with the future. Professors and lecturers pass along their wisdom while students reach new heights of excellence, challenging each other to keep up with the ever-changing face of higher education.

This year, we’re celebrating that history with our first annual Founders’ Day of Giving on Sept. 14. This is a day for all of Shocker Nation to come together to invest in our future and continue advancing the vision of our beloved university.

Dr. Ryan Amick, a Wichita State University alumnus and NASA engineer, has been selected as one of the Innovators in Residence for the College of Innovation and Design during the 2022-23 academic year.

Amick is a principal human factors engineer at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. He serves as the extravehicular activity (EVA) human factors lead, where he provides human factors and human-systems integration guidance to the NASA community as applied to development of the Exploration EVA System, and its integration with the larger NASA Spaceflight System Architecture.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced today will award $51.4 million to Wichita State University to aid in the rapid development and adoption of emerging smart manufacturing technologies for South Kansas.

The funding, provided through the American Rescue Plan Build Back Better Regional Challenge, is the largest single award the university has received from the EDA.

A Wichita State University research team has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their proposal, “Examining the feasibility of a wearable device for fetal heart rate monitoring through interdisciplinary research.”

The objective is to develop a wireless, non-invasive, wearable fetal electrocardiogram monitoring device that will use algorithms and cloud-based health monitoring to improve clinical care among pregnant women in rural communities.

Student Health Service’s walk-in vaccine clinic is open and will soon begin offering the new Bivalent booster – free of charge – for WSU and WSU Tech students, employees, families and innovation partners 18 and older.

Supplies of the new booster have not yet been made available to Wichita State, but once they are, that will be communicated to the campus community. In accordance with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, no other COVID boosters are available at this time.

For information on receiving first or second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, email heather.stafford@wichita.edu.

For more information, go to the SHS website.

The Sedgwick County Health Department will continue to provide a vaccine clinic for all eligible ages, featuring the first and second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sept. 14 at Charles Koch Arena.

Wichita State’s Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentations program (NSF MRI) for a 500 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectrometer. 

With the money from the grant, WSU is acquiring a high-tech NMR machine that — instead of providing traditional medical images we think of from a magnetic resonance imaging instrument (MRI) — will instead allow WSU researchers to map out or model a three-dimensional image of a protein (or smaller) molecule.

President Rick Muma will host a town hall for the College of Fine Arts 3:30-4:30 p.m. Oct. 7 via Zoom. The link for the town hall can be found below.

President Rick Muma will host a town hall for the College of Innovation and Design 2-3 p.m. Oct. 6 via Zoom. The Zoom link for the town hall can be found below.