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During National Autism Acceptance Month, �鶹ӰԺ will hold a film screening of “Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic” at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 7, in the �鶹ӰԺ Student Center Kiva. “Loving Lampposts” is a documentary by Todd Drezner, a father of a now 13-year-old boy with autism, that explores the changing world of autism and learns the truth of the saying “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” 

�鶹ӰԺ State researchers’ innovative techniques have unveiled surprising new details about the brain’s fertility cells that may prove useful for treating infertility disorders. After several years of research, Aleisha Moore, Lique Coolen and Michael Lehman published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, showing groundbreaking findings identifying which cells in the brain control fertility, as well as revealing an unexpected level of complexity in their control of reproduction.

Chirality, or the absence of mirror symmetry in a molecule, is a complex topic that Material Sciences Professor Torsten Hegmann is determined to know more about. Hegmann, director of the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, and other �鶹ӰԺ State collaborators led an international collaborative research project with contributions from a global team whose paper about the efficacy of chirality transfer in Science Advances may provide insights to make better materials or pharmaceuticals.

�鶹ӰԺ alumnus Earl K. Miller, Ph.D., and his wife, Marlene M. Wicherski, have pledged $2 million to support research programs and students in �鶹ӰԺ State’s Brain Health Research Institute. The Brain Health Research Institute is a recently established, cross-disciplinary institute that focuses on research and education of brain health across the lifespan.

Students across the nation were challenged as the pandemic swept the world. Healing Stanzas, a collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center, the Healthy Communities Research Institute and the Brain Health Research Institute, seeks to combine the science of brain health and public health with the creative energy of the humanities to provide �鶹ӰԺ State students, staff and faculty with an opportunity to improve wellness through reflective poetry.

Intentionality to build successful academic mentoring relationships with students is what sets professors apart at �鶹ӰԺ State, and each year two professors at the graduate and undergraduate level receive a student-nominated award for their ability to do so. The intent of the award is to recognize those professors exceeding in mentoring students in how to perform research in any field.