In an effort to retain engineering staff from a $170 million project for NASA, the University of Iowa is renovating the seventh floor of Van Allen Hall to house the Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory, a collection of labs supporting the UI’s efforts in building spaceflight instrumentation for solar system exploration. Construction on the seventh floor of Van Allen could be completed as early as mid to late March.

In November 2025, the Downtown District tested a version of the idea at St. Burch Tavern with UI associate professor Casey DeRoo. The event drew a crowd of approximately 60 people and prompted the partnership to inform the Iowa City community of the variety of achievements professors are accomplishing at the university.

Assistant Professor Dustin Swarm has received an award from NASA for a project entitled “Developing a Gamma Ray Reflectometer for 511 keV Multilayer Performance Characterization."

Dustin Swarm, an astrophysicist and assistant professor at the University of Iowa, recently helped capture the first X-ray view of a white dwarf star. Swarm, in collaboration with MIT, studied the binary star system Ex Hydrae, located 200 light-years away from Earth.