UW Highlights

The father of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as he was known, passed away on November 27, 2019. His name may be a familiar one if you've been to the University of Wyoming: William Ruckelshaus. The Ruckelshaus Institute is a division of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at UW.

As the University of Wyoming football team struggled down the stretch on offense, few people took it harder than offensive coordinator Brent Vigen. In fairness he was in a tough spot, he'd lost a number of offensive lineman, two running backs and his starting quarterback due to injuries.

As the Cowboys prepare to play in the Arizona Bowl Vigen tells Bob Beck that the silver lining is that a lot of young players just missed winning a couple of big games and that the future of Cowboy football is bright. However…the season certainly didn't go as planned.

Scientists at the University of Wyoming wanted to know how fish fare in streams near energy development. Their results were recently published in the Journal of Applied Ecology and paint a picture of how human disturbance and less water can crunch the habitat that some fish need to survive and thrive.

After checking herself in to a psychiatric hospital in 2013, writer Terese Mailhot was given a notebook. The result is her award-winning debut memoir Heartberries, which tells the story of her coming-of-age on the Seabird Island First Nation in British Columbia, sometimes-tumultuous family relationships, and adult struggles with mental illness.

"My book is essentially about how to love when you come from a dysfunctional home and you have these long shadows of shame kind of following you everywhere you go," said Mailhot, now a New York Times Bestselling author, in an interview with Wyoming Public Radio's Savannah Maher. During a recent visit to the University of Wyoming, Mailhot talked about the book's success and what Native writers risk and gain when they choose to put their stories out into the word.

Your phone, your house, your car. It all originally comes from the earth. Artist Nina Elder is fascinated by the complexity of land being at once something beautiful, sometimes sacred, and often extremely valuable - providing resources that the modern world depends on. Through long journeys to mining-based communities, Elder collects found materials and creates intricate drawings that help tell the multilayered stories that lands have to tell.

She's been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Pollock Krausner Foundation. Elder has been features in VICE Magazine, PBS and Art In America. She's also held positions as an Art + Environment Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art and Polar Lab Research Fellow. Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim speaks with Elder about her latest exhibit now at the University of Wyoming's Visual Arts Building called Nina Elder: Accumulations.

In celebration of 150 years of women's suffrage in Wyoming, the University of Wyoming Department of History presented a limerick contest. Here are the winning entries.

The author of a book called A Disability History of the United States is visiting the University of Wyoming this week as part of a celebration of the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities. Kim Nielsen is a professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. She tells Wyoming Public Radio's Bob Beck that her book was not planned.

Wyoming is one of the states with the most surviving glaciers in the lower 48 states. And trapped in the layers of all that ice is an intricate history of life on earth. During a visit to the University of Wyoming this week, Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down to talk with geoscientist Richard Alley about what this history tells us about climate change. Alley shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his work and participated in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Students gather in a sunny living room in the bright red house that serves as the Native American Center on the University of Wyoming campus. They lounge on couches, feet up on coffee tables, bemoaning homework and all the usual college kid stuff. They say they don't know what they'd do without the homey-ness of this center.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, NPR contributor and soon he'll return to Laramie on Monday, October 28th. Dubbed "the master of satire," Sedaris will spend the evening sharing his hilarious observations on the human condition. In advance of this one-night only event, the author, whose works include Santaland Diaries, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, and his most recent bestseller, Calypso, speaks with Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim.