Have a question about an upcoming event, or an event to share from an Office of Research center, institute or program? Email jsmills@alaska.edu.
Featured · Spooky Showcase
Friday
October 30
11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
Fine Arts Building · 1st Floor Lobby · UAA Main Campus
Research and creative projects, shared in a Halloween-themed experience. Wander the exhibits, meet the people behind the work and see what UAA scholars have been conjuring.
Come haunt the halls: Open to students, faculty, staff and the community. Drop in anytime to explore posters, performances and demos. It’s free to attend, light refreshments are provided, and Halloween costumes and themes are highly encouraged!
Share your work: Bring your research or creative project to life as a poster, demo, reading or performance. Contact jsmills@alaska.edu for more information.
FRACAS
Faculty Research & Creative Activity Seminar
Weekly seminars where researchers from across UAA share ongoing or recent research, scholarly and creative work. Everyone is welcome to drop in, in person or on Zoom. Interested in presenting a project, work in progress or program update? Please contact Jenni Morlan at jsmills@alaska.edu.
11:00–11:30 a.m. · Lyla Richards Rm. 103, Student Union · Hybrid
FRWG · AI
Faculty Research & Creative Activity Working Group
The working group follows FRACAS each week. This year it explores agentic AI, with faculty and staff sharing how they use AI in their work. Come share, ask questions and learn alongside colleagues. Interested in presenting? Please contact Jenni Morlan at jsmills@alaska.edu.
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. · Lyla Richards Rm. 103, Student Union · Hybrid
Grant Skills
OSP Third Thursday at Three: Participant Support
A 30-minute Zoom session from the Office of Sponsored Programs, this month on participant support costs. All are welcome.
3:00–3:30 p.m. · Zoom
Community Engagement
Book a one-on-one consultation with the Center for Community Engagement & Learning about community-engaged projects, the Selkregg Award ($5,000) or Community Engaged Student Assistantships (CESAs).
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. · Zoom · Register with CCEL
ISER Public Forum
Three visiting food economists, Craig Gundersen (Baylor), David Ortega (Michigan State) and Nicholas Li (Toronto Metropolitan), discuss food affordability challenges, followed by a Q&A moderated by ISER’s Mike Jones. Free; registration requested. Each also gives a seminar earlier that day in RH 303.
Refreshments 4:30 p.m. · Forum 5:00–6:30 p.m. · Rasmuson Hall
ISER Brown Bag
Spencer Perry, Ph.D., ISER assistant professor of economics and public policy, studies health and public economics, including how public policy shapes the choices people make under uncertainty.
11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m. · RH 220 · Zoom option
Students
Students can meet faculty and UAA research institutes, including ISER and ICHS, and learn how to get involved in research and scholarly work. Hosted by the UAA Student Research Association. The 2026 USRA Excellence in Research Award winner will be recognized.
Noon–2:00 p.m. · CPISB 120
STEM Outreach
Celebrate a decade of UAA STEM Day! Hands-on STEM activities for K-12 students and their families, with more than 1,000 visitors expected. Faculty, staff, students and community groups are invited to host an interactive table; register by Mon., Oct. 26. Space is limited. Learn more.
10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. · CPISB Atrium
Celebration
The Alaska Small Business Development Center, a UAA center, marks 40 years of service to Alaska businesses.
Time and venue to be announced
ISER Brown Bag
ISER Brown Bag seminar with ISER’s Mike Jones.
11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m. · RH 220 · Zoom option
The Second UA Statewide AI Symposium brought faculty, staff and partners from across the University of Alaska system to the UAA campus Sept. 25–27 to explore how AI can support teaching, research and operations. The public day featured an innovation showcase, demos, panels and a keynote by futurist Bryan Alexander.
The symposium was supported by a UA Faculty Initiative Fund award led by UAA’s Andrew Harnish.
Matt Jardin | September 9, 2026
The College of Engineering’s AI and Robotics Lab has a new Wearable Sensing DSI-24 electroencephalogram (EEG) system, funded by the Educational Legacy Fund, to support research on brain activity, brain-computer interfaces and AI methods for interpreting signals from the brain.
Early projects will estimate cognitive states during reading tasks and study brain activity during computer programming, and the college is inviting psychologists, educators and healthcare practitioners to collaborate.
Keenan James Britt | August 14, 2026
Ariel Taivalkoski, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology, has written Archaeological Bird Bone and Eggshell Identification, a new Cambridge Elements volume that gives students and scientists a practical method for identifying bird remains at archaeological sites.
A zooarchaeologist, Taivalkoski studies how ancestral Unangax̂ people used birds for food, tools and spiritual practice, drawing on field work in the Aleutian Islands and tens of thousands of bones in museum collections.
Keenan James Britt | July 27, 2026
Chemistry major Shelby Kelliher spent a summer research internship in Lyon, France, supported by the UAA ConocoPhillips Arctic Science and Engineering Endowment, measuring volatile organic compounds released from common plastics.
Her results fell short of statistical significance, and she presented them at UAA’s Student Research and Creative Scholarship Showcase, a reminder that reporting what doesn’t work is part of science.
Dr. Steffi Marotzke Kim is a clinical community psychologist and licensed psychologist whose work focuses on improving mental health, aging, and caregiving outcomes in Alaska, especially within Alaska Native communities. Her community-engaged research emphasizes older-adult mental health, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, family caregiving, and culturally responsive services for Alaska Native and rural communities. She is also exploring community-guided approaches to intergenerational connection, digital equity, and ethical use of AI.
Dr. Kim studies how Alaska Native Elders define and experience aging well. With colleagues she recently published Protective Factors in the Context of Successful Aging in Urban-Dwelling Alaska Native Elders (2024) and Generativity as a Traditional Way of Life: Successful Aging among Unangan Elders in the Aleutian Pribilof Islands (2024), both in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology.
She co-chairs Indigenous interest groups in the Society for Community Research and Action and the Gerontological Society of America. Visit the AN CARE Lab.
Dr. Holly Martinson is a biomedical scientist who studies how the immune system influences health, healing, and disease. Her research focuses on macrophages, immune cells that live in tissues and help coordinate repair and resilience, and on how the tissue environment changes before and during cancer development, in postpartum and women’s health, and with aging. She is deeply committed to undergraduate research and to mentoring students from rural and underserved communities.
Dr. Martinson’s lab is working to reprogram immune-suppressive myeloid cells in tumors into an immune-stimulating state, with the goal of improving how patients respond to cancer immunotherapy.
Her lab also studies cancer health disparities among Alaska Native people, including gastric and nasopharyngeal cancers, in partnership with Dr. Matthew Olnes, Director of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Alaska Native Medical Center. She is a career and research mentor for UAA’s NIH-funded BUILD EXITO program. Faculty profile
Dr. Getu Hailu is a professor of mechanical engineering who chairs the UAA–LG Consortium for Advanced Heat Pump Research (CAHR) and directs the Jan Van den Top HVAC Lab. His research focuses on air-source heat pumps, thermal storage, and solar energy systems for net-zero energy buildings in cold climates.
Dr. Hailu’s research includes building-integrated photovoltaic/thermal (BIPV/T) systems for net-zero energy buildings, air-source heat pumps and thermal storage, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and energy modeling of how these systems perform.
He is faculty advisor to UAA’s ASHRAE student chapter. About the UAA–LG Consortium
