Public Events Calendar

Enjoy a night of Bollywood dancing, hosted by the Indian Students Association.

Make/Change is a dynamic symposium that brings together industry professionals, faculty and students to explore how design can drive civic engagement, social impact, and community-centered innovation. Through keynote lectures, panel discussions, and hands-on workshops, participants will collaborate on ideas that address real-world challenges and expand the role of creative practice in public life. Join us to connect, contribute, and reimagine how design can create meaningful change. See schedule of events listed below.
Keynote Speaker 1: Ernest Wong
[caption id="attachment_62125" align="alignright" width="275"] Ernest Wong[/caption]

Ernest C. Wong, Founder and Principal of Site Design Group, has been instrumental in fostering the landscape architecture and urban design profession. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the firm is known for creative design solutions and developing community-oriented urban open spaces. The work reflects a shared commitment to improving the quality of life and resilience of diverse communities while prioritizing design excellence. Notable projects include Pullman National Park, 75th Street Boardwalk, Argyle Shared Street, Ping Tom Memorial Park, and Henry Palmisano Park. Current projects include the Obama Presidential Center, Google Chicago HQ, and the 1901 Project for the United Center neighborhood.

A strong proponent of civic and community engagement, Wong serves on numerous boards and juries, including the Driehaus Award, City Parks Alliance, Near South Planning Board, and chairs the Chicago Landmarks Commission. He is an advisor, award recipient, university lecturer, and last year produced his first TEDx Talk in Chicago. In 2021, Ernest was awarded the National ASLA Community Service Award as well as the Daniel H. Burnham Distinguished Service Award from the Lambda Alpha International Land Economics Society Ely Chapter for his dedication and commitment to service within the design industry.

Ernie Wong LinkedIn
Keynote Speaker 2: Scott Francisco
[caption id="attachment_62126" align="alignright" width="275"] Scott Francisco[/caption]

Scott Francisco is an explorer and co-designer of social and natural systems—engaging buildings, cities, cultures, and forests as part of a single, interconnected field. With a foundation in technical architectural practice, including wood and mass timber construction, his work now extends to the design and understanding of organizations, forest-based value systems, and the global networks that link cities to their “far forests”—and to the communities who live within them.

Through research, theory, and practice, he advances design as both an approach and a discipline that connects ecology, material supply chains, and human aspiration. At the core of his work is a belief in the unique role of human agency and intentionality—and a deep commitment to the development of young people as the future builders of our culture, institutions, and shared environment.

Scott Francisco LinkedIn
Pilot Projects website
Workshop Host: Jenn Stucker
[caption id="attachment_62120" align="alignright" width="225"] Jenn Stucker[/caption]

Jenn Stucker is a professor and chair of Graphic Design at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Bowling Green, Ohio. Her teaching background includes courses in the undergraduate BFA in Graphic Design program, the graduate MDes in Integrative Design program, and Entrepreneurship courses in the College of Business, focusing on impactful design and facilitation for social change. She has received award recognition in numerous national design publications. She has presented at several design conferences, both nationally and internationally, focusing on her teaching and research interests in design pedagogy, community engagement, and creative placemaking. Stucker has chaired or co-chaired four national design education conferences. In 2018, GD USA recognized her as “Person to Watch.” Her most recent co-created work, IN THE ROUND: A Speaker Series of Native Creatives, has earned her numerous accolades and was recognized in 2025 with a Mosaic Educator Award by AAF Toledo. Stucker is a certified AIGA-DL design leader and holds an RGD Canada certification. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Higher Education Administration at BGSU, researching the changing role of designers in higher education leadership positions.

Jenn Stucker LinkedIn
SISU Design website

In partnership with the Office of Sustainability, join University Museums for Iowa State’s Earth Day Celebration, where campus and community organizations come together to showcase sustainability in action. Visit the University Museums table at Iowa State’s annual Earth Day Celebration to learn about upcoming programs and explore how art and nature connect through the Anderson Sculpture Garden — now featuring a New Perennial Movement Garden rooted in sustainable design. 🌱✨ Enjoy free giveaways and treats while they last!

The Department of Landscape Architecture, in collaboration with the Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, is hosting a viewing of "Sitting Still," a 90-minute documentary that features preeminent landscape architect Laurie Olin — one of the world's most influential urban designers — and his profoundly social vision.

Olin's life story of growing up in Alaska on the edge of the American frontier, challenging belief systems around designing in nature, and his lifelong work transforming environments for social good are the launching pad for "Sitting Still." Part portrait of the artist and part exploration of social concerns, the film looks at the critical importance of humanity in design in order to create more livable cities. Olin and other design visionaries — including Frank Gehry, Billie Tsien, and Walter Hood, among others — bring into sharp focus the marks we make upon the land and why they matter.

A student and professional social will be from 5:30–6 p.m., with the documentary beginning at 6 p.m., followed by film discussion at 7:30 p.m. All are welcome to participate.

Speaker: Gary Wells
A True Crime ISU Series Lecture

Confident eyewitness identification testimony in court has long been highly persuasive to judges and jurors. Starting in the late 1970s, however, lab-based experiments by psychological scientists started uncovering highly troubling concerns with eyewitness identification evidence. The legal system largely ignored this growing eyewitness science until mid-1990s when forensic DNA testing was developed and used to exonerate large numbers of innocent people who were convicted by juries. Approximately 70% of these DNA exonerations involved mistaken eyewitness identifications and Wells uses some cases he has been involved with that illustrate key problems. Wells then describes the progress made by psychological scientists in helping the legal system improve ways to collect, preserve, and interpret eyewitness identification evidence and how this has changed crime investigator and courtroom practices.

Gary L. Wells is an internationally recognized research psychologist whose work has shaped how legal systems handle eyewitness evidence. For decades he has combined laboratory research, field studies, policy work, and direct training for police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges. Wells has authored over 150 scientific articles, received major national awards (including lifetime achievement recognition), led federal and national panels (including Department of Justice), secured substantial funding from NSF and other agencies, and disseminated his findings to the public via mass media (e.g., New York Times, 60 Minutes). Courts and law enforcement agencies frequently consult him on improving identification procedures.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Psychology Department, Sociology and Criminal Justice Department, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Speaker: Justice Christopher McDonald
America's founding charter was not designed to produce consensus. It was designed to make disagreement governable. This address by Iowa Supreme Court Justice Christopher McDonald explores the Constitution's deliberate architecture of tension, the judiciary's growing centrality to the resolution of those tensions, and the ongoing dialogue between state and federal courts that embodies the Founders' vision of productive institutional competition.

Justice McDonald was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Des Moines. He graduated from Des Moines Lincoln High School, and he earned his undergraduate degree from Grand View University. Justice McDonald earned his law degree, with highest distinction, from the University of Iowa College of Law in 2001. At the College of Law, he received the John F. Murray award given to the class valedictorian and was elected to the Order of the Coif academic honor society.

After graduating from law school, Justice McDonald served as a law clerk to the Honorable David R. Hansen, United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Justice McDonald worked in private practice at Faegre & Benson and Belin McCormick and then as National Litigation Counsel for an international life and annuity company. In 2012, he was appointed to serve as a judge of the District Court, Fifth Judicial District of Iowa. In 2013, he was appointed to the Iowa Court of Appeals. In 2019, he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Cyclone Civics, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Don't miss GRANDMA MOJO's, Iowa State's premier improv comedy troupe, for nights of hilarity, every other Wednesday all semester!

Speaker: Matty Glasgow
This reading and lecture by poet and community organizer, Matty Layne Glasgow, invites us to consider the paradoxical—how we might deconstruct established taxonomic categories of genre, science, and cultural identity to help us innovate new practices that can embrace the queer and fluid, the lyric, joyful, and connective.

Rethinking established taxonomic categories can create an imaginative space that not only obscures and “queers” rigid binaries, but also helps us cultivate kinship relationships that can transcend difference—whether those differences be gendered and cultural, or species-based. Through this reimagining, we can find creative practices that foster community and forge new intersections of experience that connect, rather than enforce previous separations of identity and subculture.

Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of the award-winning poetry collection "deciduous qween", published by Red Hen Press in 2019, He is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston where he teaches poetry and nonfiction. A 2022-2025 Black Earth Institute Fellow, Glasgow co-edited the About Place Journal’s “Strange Wests” and served as Editor of Quarterly West, as well as the coordinator of the Wasatch Writers in the Schools program in Salt Lake City.

A graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State, Glasgow also received a PhD in Creative Writing & English Literature from the University of Utah where he was awarded a Vice Presidential Fellowship, a Jeff Metcalf Humanities in the Community Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center. Matty’s poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from "Crazyhorse", "Copper Nickel", "Denver Quarterly", "Ecotone", "Gulf Coast", "Houston Public Media", "Kenyon Review", the "Missouri Review", "Pleiades", "Poetry Daily", "Third Coast", and elsewhere.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.

The University Book Store will be onsite selling the speaker's book at the event.
Co-Sponsors: Pearl Hogrefe Visiting Writers Series, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Recharge with Yoga in the Garden! As the end of the semester approaches, take a break and reset with a free yoga session in the Anderson Sculpture Garden. Let the creativity around you inspire your movement and calm your mind. No experience needed—just bring your mat and meet in the Christian Petersen Art Museum (1017 Morrill Hall) before we head to the great outdoors! Museum Meetups are free and open to all. In the event of inclement weather, the event will be held indoors.

Speaker: Melinda Myers
Nationally known gardening expert, TV/radio host, author & columnist Melinda Myers has over 40 years of horticulture experience and has written more than 20 gardening books, including her most recent Midwest Gardener's Handbook, 2nd Edition. She hosts the “Melinda’s Garden Moment” radio program and The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” instant video series. Myers is a garden columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms and hosted “The Plant Doctor” radio show for over 20 years and 7 seasons of “Great Lakes Gardener” on PBS.

This lecture recording can be found on the Available Recordings page approximately two business days after the event and will remain accessible for three weeks.
Co-Sponsors: Horticulture Department, Natural Resource Ecology and Management Department, Reiman Gardens, University Library, Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!

Cece Winans’ More Than This Tour will be one of the most comprehensive tours of CeCe’s entire career! Each night will feature the worship moments you have come to expect, Goodness of God, Believe For It, and Alabaster Box; while also introducing you to the new standards, That’s My King, Holy Forever, Come Jesus Come, and more.

“I pray that this new tour, More Than This, will remind people of God’s greatness, not just His goodness. I want God to give us more of Himself and in return we give Him all He deserves,” says Winans. “We are praying with expectation of what is coming and we hope you’ll join us." What should attendees expect when they arrive for the concert?

Concert attendees should expect a night of worship that is unapologetically honest, celebratory, and unifying, where the full body of Christ can come and worship our King, Jesus, TOGETHER!

Tickets go on sale now at 10am at the Stephens Ticket Office or at www.ticketmaster.com.

Nora Wendl will present "Almost Nothing," the 2026 Curt F. Dale Guest Lecture in Architecture, at 4 p.m. Friday, April 24, in the College of Design's Kocimski Auditorium.

In her talk, based on her book of the same name, Wendl—an essayist, artist, and associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico—will illustrate her approach to rewriting modernist architectural history and share elements of her current work-in-progress, a nuclear memoir.
About the speaker
Wendl teaches studio and theory at the University of New Mexico. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and National Trust for Historic Preservation, among other institutions.

She has exhibited and published widely, and her most recent book, "Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth" (University of Ilinois Press, 2025)—an architectural history as memoir—was shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. From 2021–2024, she was the executive editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.

She holds a bachelor of architecture and a master of architecture from Iowa State.
About the named lecture
The Curt F. Dale Guest Lecture in Architecture was established in 2003 in memory of 1969 Iowa State University architecture alumnus Curt F. Dale, who died in a skiing accident that year. Dale’s family and his firm, AndersonMasonDale Architects in Denver, created the endowed fund for the Iowa State architecture department to bring distinguished practitioners to campus as guest lecturers.

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!

The M-Shop brings in Iowa punk-pop favorites Lipstick Homicide along with Des Moines rockers Bat Problem!

Join us for a 4K route around campus to raise awareness for suicide prevention. The event will feature live music, a resource fair, face painting, honor beads, and speakers. Coffee and baked goods will be available for purchase from The Bell Bottom Cafe and the Piece and Freedom Bakery.

Explore new stories and create your own at the Brunnier Art Museum! Activities and crafts for children and families will focus on imagination and storytelling. Enjoy the exhibition Tell Me a Story and the many works of art on view. Participants are encouraged to come dressed as their favorite fairytale character. Activities geared for grades K-5; all are welcome. Stop by any time during the three-hour window, while supplies last. No admission fee or registration. Free, easy parking.

Registration includes a T-shirt and snacks. Online registration is open until April 24 at noon. In-person registration will be available at the event.

Run or walk to support Stead Family Children's Hospital and the local families treated there. The First 150 registrants will get a t-shirt!

A retirement reception will be held for Arne Hallam, senior associate dean for finance and operations in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of economics, to honor his 43 years of service to the university. Hallam will retire on June 30.

SUB and The Pride Alliance present the Spring Drag Show!

Iowa State Soccer vs UNI
https://cyclones.com/calendar.aspx?game_id=18593&sport_id=12

SUB and The Pride Alliance present the Spring Drag Show!

Don't miss this FREE Cyclone Cinema showing of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants!