Events Listing

The event will be a live presentation on Zoom to discuss common non-immigrant visas and green card options for international students, including recent developments. Sarah Peterson, a nationally-recognized immigration attorney based in Minneapolis with over 16 years of advanced employment-based immigration experience, will discuss strategies and answer questions.

This event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, November 10th, and it will include a live Question and Answer opportunity with Sarah who will be present to address some questions from the audience. This session will be recorded and shared on the ISSS website.

Recommended for all ages

Spotlight Science is a regular program connecting you to current science conducted at the University of Minnesota and in our community. Join researchers, students, and special guests for conversations and unique interactive experiences.

Connect with researchers from the University of Minnesota who will showcase their exciting work in brain science through a day of demonstrations and exciting hands-on activities. Explore what the brain does and how it changes over a lifetime. Investigate human and other animal brains up-close. Learn about the consequences of brain injury and drug addiction.

More information and details

Physical computation

What makes something a computer? We are familiar with computational artifacts--devices made by people--but are there any "natural" computers? Many neuroscientists maintain that the brain is in fact a computer, so that we should explain its workings in computational terms. Some biologists explain phenomena as diverse as cell dynamics, swarming behavior, and slime mould foraging as computational. Many of these tacitly employ a "simple mapping account" which holds that any phenomena that can be modeled ("mapped") as a Turing machine or some equivalent notion is a computer. But this account wildly overgeneralizes, allowing almost any physical thing of sufficient complexity to be a computer, thereby threatening to rob computational explanations of their power. After reviewing the problems that various amendments to the simple mapping account face, I suggest a quite different account: what makes something a computer is how an agent uses the thing. Finally I draw some lessons from this agent-centric view for computational explanations in the natural world.

About Professor Sam Fletcher

Sam Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an External Member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

WIE is excited to welcome Collins Aerospace to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. They will provide an informational session on  Wednesday, November 2, from 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm in 512B Bruininks Hall. Food will be provided! Bring friends and come to listen to what it's like working at Collins and the opportunities they have for UMN students! You must RSVP. 

The University of Minnesota Police Department and the Global Gopher Influencers will give you tips about staying safe on campus and preparing for winter.

Join us for a live presentation discussing the various types of employment-based visas (including H-1B) and paths to permanent residency (“green card”). The presentation will be done by John Medeiros, an immigration attorney with nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law.  This event will be held via Zoom on Tuesday, November 1st at 12:00pm CST, and it will include a live Question and Answer opportunity with John who will be present to address your questions. This event will also be recorded and shared on the ISSS website. There will be other immigration attorney presentations in the month of November.
Zoom Registration Link

October Star Party

Recommended for all ages

Join the Bell Museum and the White Bear Center for the Arts for a special event in celebration of NEA Big Read. We’ll have telescopes set up to observe our favorite deep space objects (weather permitting!) on the roof deck. In our outdoor plaza spaces, the Big Woods Garden and the North Woods Garden, follow along on a tour of the constellations we can see in our skies. Inside, you can explore hands-on activities, and our expert astronomy team will guide you through celestial phenomena associated with The Bear by Andrew Krivak in the planetarium. NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.

More details and information

Calling all international students in Minnesota!

Join us to gain insight into how your unique international background and experiences can support your professional development. Learn about networking on a global scale, how to talk about international experiences with prospective employers, and hear from local professionals and international alumni about how an international background is valuable in a career.

This event is open to international students studying at any college or university in Minnesota. This event is designed for international students, but we won't exclude any other students from attending.

This event is hosted by Global Minnesota and University of Minnesota - Twin Cities Career Services Administration. Please reach out Anna at adewitt@globalminnesota.org and/or Jane at sitt0036@umn.edu with any questions about this event.

The Art of Magnetic Manipulation

Magnetism is capable of manipulation of objects both large and small, near and far, visible and invisible. This talk will focus on two ways in which magnetic devices are being developed for manipulation. More specifically, I will present two examples in which we are using magnetism to design extremely versatile devices with applications to haptics and communications. First, we will consider what is needed to make a reconfigurable haptic interface, one that gives the user the sensation that they are feeling what they are seeing on a visual display. True 3D fidelity in a tactile display requires extremely flexible materials that can also be programmed real-time to physically illustrate what is visually displayed on the screen. Here, I will present how our magnetic elastomer composites can be used to achieve such fidelity. The projects discussed will illustrate the impact of magnetism on the design of broadly versatile devices to ameliorate both technology and society in the future.

About Professor El-Ghazaly

Amal El-Ghazaly is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University. Her work combines magnetism, ferroelectricity, and waves to create versatile electronic systems for telecommunications, sensing and actuation. Prior to joining Cornell in 2019, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley, where she received the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2017. Her postdoctoral research explored ultrafast all-electrical switching of magnetic nanodots for faster computer memories. She earned a Ph.D. in 2016 in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where she was funded by both NSF and NDSEG graduate research fellowships as well as the Stanford DARE fellowship. Her Ph.D. research focused on radio frequency magnetic and magnetoelectric thin-film devices for tunable communications. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011.

At the College of Science and Engineering's (CSE) Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, CSE graduate students will have exactly three minutes to explain their research in an engaging and easy-to-understand format. You will hear presentations on a variety of different topics ranging from robotics to health systems and devices. The competition celebrates the innovative research conducted by our graduate students and cultivates their academic, presentation, and research communications skills.

You can attend the event in-person or view it live on Zoom. All registered audience members will receive instructions for joining virtually a day or two before the competition event.