| Rocket scientists in the making | | | | 
This spring, University of Iowa engineering students spent hours building competition-worthy, high‑powered rockets. The project required printing and soldering circuit boards, embedding GPS systems, writing flight software, and designing custom sensors.
In May, students competed with their 5-foot-tall rockets at the Midwest High‑Power Rocketry Competition in Minnesota. The competition required a video feed from the rocket that had to decrypt a message on the ground, while students used roll, pitch, and yaw to identify the rocket's position. | | | | | | Launching July 1, Iowa INSIGHT will centralize publicly available data into a research database designed to support studies on environmental risk factors affecting Iowans, from the air we breathe to the water we drink. | | | | | Progress made in reducing surface ozone pollution and smog – achieved as vehicles, industries, and power sources became cleaner – is becoming overshadowed by a growing source of ozone pollution: wildfires. | | | | | | Having Iowa’s largest medical center on campus created a valuable opportunity for a trio of industrial and systems engineering (ISE) students to improve the hospital room cleaning process. | | | | | Marcelo Mena, an Iowa engineering alumnus, recently had an audience with His Majesty King Charles III following a renewed United Nations call to action on methane emissions. | | 
For the second straight summer, the College of Engineering has hosted a 10-day paid summer camp/mini-internship focused on advancing undergraduate students’ knowledge in weather intelligence, agricultural resilience, and environmental monitoring.
The 2026 KANI Summer Camp engaged 23 students from seven institutions, featuring hands-on experience with iCanopy sensor networks, drone-based data collection, GIS software, and weather data analysis pipelines, culminating in a poster presentation session. The students also visited the UI’s Operator Performance Lab at the Iowa City Municipal Airport, where they learned about flight science, avionics, and the use of aircraft in research. The camp is open to college students from Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Iowa (the KANI states). | | | |
