Olivia Calvin: If You Want To Go Farther, Go Together
When Olivia, an accomplished math major at Coe College, sought otherwise un-offered opportunities to explore the field of geography, she was introduced to Rebecca (Lakeside faculty) and agreed to tag along for summer field work internship in NW Iowa in 2021. Olivia did not set out to work in laboratories like her peers. She […]
Alysia Berns: Iowan Sense of Place
“Education” does not end at the name of the bird or the physics of flight. The kind of education that shimmers offers a sense of place: during her time at Lakeside Lab, Alysia developed a first-hand, intimate knowing of bones, fish, birds and plants. While sinking deeper into the landscape around the Iowa Great Lakes, she […]
Kathy Kleen: Permission for Passion
Strong leaders show rather than tell, just as strong educators learn as they lead. During the Lakeside summer of 1984, Kathy Kleen, a then-aspiring teacher pursuing a biology degree at Northwestern College, immersed herself within a group of impassioned professors. Impassioned as they were, dripping with excitement and interest like over-laden sponges, she soaked up their surplus energy and left […]
Al Alder: Practical Knowledge Takes Scientists Far
In a sense, we are all connected by water. As the snow melts and spring rains fall across the Midwest, some of that water wends its way through the prairie, into the great Mississippi, and out into the Gulf of Mexico. Some of that water eventually evaporates into the atmosphere and drops as fresh rain […]
Matt Julius: “Lakeside is Where Our People Come Home”
Before the sun rises and Iowa Great Lakes locals awake, birds take flight over the tallgrass prairies. The bird chorus starts at dawn. Lakeside Lab faculty and students venture where the sky reaches overhead 180 degrees, in darkness, to wait for their greeting songs to a new day. Greatness lives just under our noses and […]
Diatomy at Lakeside: The Quick and Dirty for The Curious Local
(A brief history of diatoms! As adapted through conversation with Matt Julius, a Lakeside affiliate & professor of Biology and Science History at St. Cloud State University) What happens behind Lakeside’s stone gates? What unfolds along the shoreline in Little Miller’s Bay? What has transpired along snaking trails deep in the prairielands? As a […]
Josie Hoien: “Lakeside Magic” Stories of Impact Project Overview
Do you remember the first time you witnessed a landscape transform into a stage for fireflies on a summer night? You catch the first light out of the corner of your eye: did you see that? You see another: yellow light, come and gone, streaked beyond the old oak tree. Maybe you cross your […]