February 25, 2026

In 50 years of forestry education in Michigan Tech’s College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science (CFRES), some things have changed while others stay the same. Just ask Nate Koetje ’25 and his grandfather, Rog Hoeksema ’72 — Husky foresters from two different generations, bound by family ties and their love of the natural world.

In the latest issue of Re:Generations Magazine, Koetje and Hoeksema reflect on their time at Tech and share their unique perspectives on the College’s long-term growth.

“CFRES and its foresters still embody the love of managing public and private lands sustainably for the good of our country. I am proud of my grandson and grateful that he has had a similar experience as I had at Tech,” said Hoeksema.

“My grandpa, being a forester, played a role in deciding to study forestry. I remember as a young child visiting the Department of Natural Resources office, where my grandpa was working before he retired. Since the start of college, I have learned a lot more about forestry — and continue to!” said Koetje.

Meet the grandson/grandfather forestry duo in Re:Generations Magazine.

Invasive species in the Upper Peninsula are giving native plants the buckthorn blues, but Huskies in Michigan Tech’s College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science (CFRES) are here to help with innovative solutions.

Ph.D. candidate Chris Hohnholt (forest science), Research Assistant Professor Sigrid Resh, and Tech alumni Amber Marchel ’19 and Abe Stone ’24 use different strategies to fight back against glossy and common buckthorn. Their methods include everything from natural treatments to herbicide applications. 

Whether buckthorn is remediated through hand removal or herbicide, fought with fungus, or gobbled up by goats, the stubborn invasive plants are no match for Husky tenacity!

Get tips to help banish buckthorn from your property on the CFRES Blog.

The application window for the Spring 2026 Michigan Tech Faculty DC Trip closes this Friday, Feb. 27 — don’t miss your chance to apply!

Scheduled for early May 2026, this long-standing tradition connects researchers with funding agencies and collaboration opportunities in Washington, D.C. To date, 167 individuals have attended at least one Research Development-led DC Trip. This year’s trip is a general interest trip with no specific research theme, meaning researchers from any discipline are encouraged to apply.

How to Apply
Complete the short application form by Friday, Feb. 27, at 11:59 p.m. EST. The application is nonbinding and helps the planning team understand the group’s composition and informs cost-share decisions from MTU’s colleges and Vice President for Research Office. Note that future communications about the DC Trip will be limited to those who submit the form, so apply even if you’re on the fence.

After submitting your application, start talking to your chair and dean about attending and begin compiling a list of program officers you’d like to meet. Visit the DC Trip website for the full timeline and updates.

Questions? Reach out to the Research Development team at rd-l@mtu.edu.

The Aging, Cognition, and Action Lab at Michigan Tech is studying how younger and older adults use their hands and arms to complete tasks. We want to learn more about how the brain and body work together as people get older.

If you are between 60-85 years of age, have no medical conditions that affect how your hands and arms move, have no major injuries to your hands or arms, have normal vision or corrected-to-normal vision (glasses/contacts) and are interested in participating in paid research ($20 per hour for roughly two hours), please call 906-487-2378 or email agingcognitionlab@mtu.edu to learn more.

The Financial Services and Operations Lunch and Learn is today, Feb. 25, from noon to 1 p.m. ET on Zoom.

For anyone who has not yet received the Zoom link via Google Calendar invite and for those interested in joining who did not previously register, please join us with the following Zoom link. Please note that you will need to be signed into Zoom with your MTU credentials.

Join FSO's Lunch and Learn on Zoom.

It is not required to register in advance for today's event, but if you would like to receive the recorded Zoom and have the opportunity to provide feedback after the session, please consider registering on our Lunch and Learn Registration form.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Jamie Meleen at jameleen@mtu.edu or 906-487-2122.

On March 31, award-winning theatre performer Kuniko Yamamoto will take the Rozsa stage for two Class Act Series performances of “Magical Mask, Music and Mime of Japan” for local pre-K and K-12 audiences. In addition, she has graciously offered to lead a Japanese Koto Green Tea Ceremony as an intimate Rozsa Backstage event for a limited group of participants in an effort to help raise funds to support future Class Act opportunities.

The Rozsa Center’s Class Acts programming opens the door to new arts experiences for young people through performances, education and arts activities. This is an opportunity to take part in and learn about an ancient Japanese ceremony while also helping to support the Rozsa’s effort to bring the performing arts to Upper Peninsula schoolchildren.

Get Tickets
Tickets for the tea ceremony are $50 minimum and include the ceremony, the tea cup game, a tea cup to take home created specifically for this event by local artist Kenyon Hansen, and a donation to the Class Acts Endowment Fund. Space is limited, so act fast to secure your spot for this rare cultural experience.

Koto Green Tea Ceremony hosted by Kuniko Yamamoto
Tuesday, March 31 | 5:30 p.m.
Rozsa Backstage
Rozsa Presenting Series

Nominations are open to celebrate and recognize the individual and group efforts of students involved across campus at the 32nd Annual Student Leadership Awards! The nomination deadline for all awards is March 9 at 11:59 p.m. Each week leading up to the nomination deadline, we will highlight awards for which you could nominate an outstanding member of our community!

This week we are highlighting our “Student Group” Awards! Student groups include registered student organizations through Student Leadership and Involvement, house communities through Residence Education or Housing, or Enterprise groups.

• Exceptional Program of the Year: This award celebrates student groups whose programs go above and beyond to foster inclusion, enrich learning, and build connections within the Michigan Tech community. These programs create positive change and enhance the campus experience. Help us highlight the groups whose programs have made a meaningful difference. Nominate a group on the Exceptional Program of the Year nomination form.

• Most Improved Student Group: This award celebrates groups who have faced difficulties head-on, making improvements in their operations, engagement or initiatives. Through hard work, flexibility and a commitment to progress, these groups not only survive challenges — they thrive and make a lasting impact on the Michigan Tech community. Help us recognize the groups that have turned obstacles into opportunities for success. Nominate a student group today on the Most Improved Student Group nomination form.

• Student Group of the Year: This award recognizes student groups that not only meet their objectives but also contribute meaningfully to the campus environment. Through their dedication, collaboration and hard work, these groups play an integral role in shaping the Michigan Tech community. Help us recognize the group that has shown exceptional leadership, innovation and community impact. Nominate a standout student group on the Student Group of the Year nomination form.

Find more information about all the awards and nomination forms on the Student Leadership Award webpage.

The next Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Graduate Seminar speaker will present at 2 p.m. tomorrow, Feb. 26, in EERC 103.

Geordan Gutow will present “Turning Word Problems You Can’t Solve into Math Problems You Can: Formulating Robotics Problems as Tractable Constrained Optimizations”.

From the abstract:
This talk describes a number of seemingly disparate problems of interest to roboticists, ranging from control to state estimation and motion planning, and describes how they can be tackled as optimization problems using ideas from differential geometry, probability, and operations research. We show how optimization often serves as the unifying language to connect the interdisciplinary challenges inherent to robotics.

The next guest speaker of the semester in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BioMed) Seminar Series will present Friday, Feb. 27, at 3 p.m. in Chem Sci 102 and virtually via Zoom.

Join the BioMed Seminar on Zoom.

Jinseok Park from the University of Southern California will present “Straight-Line to Relapse: How an Aligned Extracellular Matrix Makes Neuroblastoma Therapy-Resistant”.

Read Park’s abstract and bio at the University Events Calendar.

Vanessa Cubillos Tellez ’23 (M.S. Biological Sciences) is the lead author of a paper recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences.

The paper, based on Cubillos Tellez’s M.S. thesis research, is titled “Differential Contributions From Chemo- and Photoautotrophy to Winter Primary Production in a North Temperate Freshwater System”.

Co-authors include Trista Vick-Majors and Mari Leland (both BioSci/GLRC), former Ph.D. student Maci Quintanilla (biological sciences) and Mohiuddin Munawar of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Cubillos Tellez’s research was supported by a student research grant from the Michigan Chapter of the North American Lake Management Society and funding to Vick-Majors from the Michigan Space Grant Consortium.

Lisa Gordillo (VPR) is traveling to Guatemala to install the first phase of “La Biblioteca de Alas Abiertas,” “The Library of Open Wings,” a mobile library created for the schools of Niños de Guatemala on the outskirts of Antigua, Guatemala.

The library will include flexible shelves, accessible sitting spaces and a mural based on the poem “El Colibrí y La Flor,” “The Hummingbird and the Flower” written by Guatemalan writer Hugo Gordillo.

GPS World mentioned Michigan Tech in a story about a collaboration between MTU’s Van Pelt and Opie Library and Department of Social Sciences to geolocate 11,000 historical images from Michigan’s Copper Country using GIS tools, helping improve searchability and provide richer context for archival photos.

Traverse City’s Ticker mentioned Michigan Tech in a story about Northwestern Michigan College allocating $2 million to support construction of the Freshwater Research and Innovation Center (FRIC), a blue tech partnership that includes MTU.

Interlochen Public Radio mentioned Michigan Tech alum Deedra Irwin ’15 (B.S. Exercise Science) in a story about how Michigan athletes fared at the 2026 Winter Olympics, noting her competition in biathlon events.

Mathematical Sciences Graduate Student Seminar with Sontosh Sahani and Kamilu Adedokun

Please join the Department of Mathematical Sciences in Fisher 326 tomorrow, Feb. 26, from 12-1 p.m. for our Graduate Student Seminar Series.

Refreshments will be provided. Contact the math department’s graduate program assistant, Andi Schoch, via email at ajschoch@mtu.edu or in person in Fisher 318 with any questions.

Presentation 1
Ph.D. candidate Sontosh Sahani will present “High-order Bound-Preserving Discontinuous Galerkin Methods with Lagrange Multipliers for Wormhole Propagation”.

From the abstract:
Acid-induced wormhole formation in carbonate reservoirs is governed by coupled reactive transport processes that describe the evolution of porosity and acid concentration during mineral dissolution. These variables are physically constrained to remain within the interval [0, 1], with porosity exhibiting a non-decreasing behavior over time. Ensuring that numerical simulations respect these intrinsic bounds is critical for obtaining stable and physically meaningful solutions. In this work, we propose a high-order bound-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for the wormhole propagation model that maintains these constraints at the discrete level. The formulation employs a reformulated conservative variable together with an associated auxiliary equation derived from a consistent flux construction, enabling the application of positivity-preserving corrections within a unified framework. A local correction strategy based on Lagrange multipliers and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions is then used to enforce the bounds while preserving cell-wise mass. The resulting scheme achieves high-order accuracy while maintaining the admissible range of the solution variables under practical time-stepping conditions. Numerical results are presented to verify the accuracy and robustness of the proposed approach.

Presentation 2
Ph.D. student Kamilu Adedokun will present “The RBF-FD method for solving twophase flow problems with moving interfaces”.

From the abstract:
Cryogenic rocket propellants, including liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX), commonly exhibit liquid–vapor two-phase behavior in propulsion systems. Resolving the associated moving interfaces with high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods is computationally intensive, creating the need for more efficient modeling approaches. This study introduces a Lagrangian vortex-sheet formulation for describing liquid–vapor interfaces that substantially lowers computational cost. In this framework, the velocity field is computed from the Biot–Savart integral, interpreted in the principal-value sense. Spatial derivatives are approximated using a radial basis function–generated finite difference (RBF-FD) scheme, allowing accurate evaluation of curvature-related terms, temperature gradients, and other physical quantities. Owing to its meshless nature, the method eliminates the need for repeated remeshing as the interface evolves, addressing a key limitation of traditional mesh- based techniques. The approach is tested on a problem to assess the combined effectiveness of the principal-value Biot–Savart formulation for velocity evaluation and RBF-FD discretization for spatial derivatives. The results indicate a great reduction in numerical error.

To have your event automatically appear, please submit them to the University Events Calendar.

Women's Rights are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-based Inequality, Violence, and Discrimination Gallery Exhibit - Rozsa Art Galleries

Wednesday, February 25, 8 a.m.–9 p.m. | Rozsa Art Galleries, Rozsa Art Galleries A-Space

MICHIGAN TECH ART SERIES EVENT Women’s Rights are Human Rights is a fitting title for an exhibition of women’s rights and advocacy posters, as it was a term used in the women’s rights movement and was the title of an important speech given by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. This exhibition features posters created by artsit of all genders to celebrate and acknowledge the vital role that all citizens should play in protecting and promoting human rights while challenging gender inequality and stereotypes, advancing reproductive and sexual rights, protecting women and girls against brutality, and promoting women’s empowerment and participation in society. These poster images challenge patriarchal attitudes that subordinate, stigmatize or restrict women from achieving their fullest potential. These images argue for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls enabling empowerment of women and achievement of real equality between women and men that fosters societal stability and human dignity. Learn more at womensrightsarehumanrights.org Things to know ROZSA ART GALLERIES HOURS | M-F 8 a.m.-8 p.m. and…

Engineering Week - College of Engineering EPassport

Wednesday, February 25, 10 a.m.–10 p.m. | Michigan Tech Campus, Campus Learning Centers and Dean's Office

Collect stamps, explore resources, and connect with support services across the College of Engineering. Get rewarded for completing the passport, including being entered into a prize drawing! This event is part of week long activities to explore engineering pathways, connect with leaders, and have some fun with classic engineering challenges as part of the National Engineers Week. Find out more here!

Accessible Tech Challenge Working Session: Tables

Wednesday, February 25, 2–4 p.m. | J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library

Join the Center for Teaching and Learning (Technical Workshops) for the following opportunity: Working session: Tables When: Wednesday, February 25, 2026 Where: Library Room 243 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Join us for an Accessible Tech Challenge Working Session, a practical, hands-on opportunity to strengthen the accessibility of your digital course materials. Each session focuses on one key skill area, explains why it matters for students, and gives you dedicated time to work on your own content and get real-time guidance from campus digital accessibility experts. Topic for February 25th: Tables Well-structured tables help students grasp relationships in your content and ensure that assistive technology can interpret the information accurately. In this session you'll learn how to create accessible tables by adding captions, headers, and scope attributes that support learning for all your students. Register today to reserve your spot https://mtu.libcal.com/event/15778946 and bring your laptop to work on content you'd like to improve. Accommodation requests can be made on the registration screen, by emailing ctl@mtu.edu, or by calling (906) 48…

BMES General Meeting

Wednesday, February 25, 4–6 p.m. | ChemSci 102

This semester, our general meetings are every other (even) Wednesdays at 4pm in ChemSci 102. Any changes and topics for each meeting will be announced the week before the meeting takes place.

Huskies Swim Training - Session 2

Wednesday, February 25, 4–6 p.m. | Student Development Complex (SDC), Pool

Huskies Swim Training is a program that provides additional attention and competitive guidance to advanced swimmers looking to focus on stroke technique and efficiency. Sessions will be designed to improve swimming through stroke drills and swimming sets focused on endurance, speed, and race strategy. Coaches will provide feedback and stroke correction in a group environment with an emphasis on promoting a love for competitive swimming and lifelong skills such as discipline, dedication, and teamwork. Come be part of the pack! Competitve swimming opportunities are now availabe to current Huskies Swim Training participants!

WIBIT Events

Wednesday, February 25, 5–9 p.m. | Student Development Complex (SDC), Pool

Come make a splash with our inflatable pool obstacle course called the WIBIT! You can test your individual skills on the course or challenge a friend to a race across the obstacles. The course is set up in the deep water and requires users to be able to pass our swim test. A full list of WIBIT rules and swim test options as well as featured obstacle combinations can be found on the WIBIT page on our website. All pool rules can be found here.

31 Backpacks

Wednesday, February 25, 6–8 p.m. | Glad Tidings Assembly of God

Come knock out a couple of your volunteer hours with fellow Thompson Scholars! 31 backpacks puts together packages of essentials for those in need around the area. It is in Hancock, so rides will be provided upon request, please email or google chat fmhuffma@mtu.edu! Please RSVP so that TSA can provide a proper headcount to the 31 Backpacks organization!

Engineering Week - College of Engineering Dean’s Panel

Wednesday, February 25, 6–8 p.m. | Dow Environmental Sciences and Engineering Building, 641

Hear insights, advice, and perspectives from College of Engineering Deans on leadership, career pathways, and the future of engineering education—valuable for students, faculty, and staff alike. This event is part of week long activities to explore engineering pathways, connect with leaders, and have some fun with classic engineering challenges as part of the National Engineers Week. Find out more here!

SMLS Bi-Weekly Meeting

Wednesday, February 25, 6–8 p.m. | Fisher 231

Welcome to the Society of Medical Laboratory Scientists! We host meetings every other week to discuss topics within the major, career development opportunities, volunteer opportunities, and do MLS themed crafts. We are open to all majors, and welcome anyone with an interest in MLS.

Pickleball Club Weekly Practice/Meeting

Wednesday, February 25, 9 p.m.–12 a.m. | Gates Tennis Center

Come join us at Gates Tennis Center for some Pickleball! We have equipment that is free to use and its a great way to have some friendly competition against fellow huskies. If you have never played pickleball and want to learn, then you came to the right place! We can teach you how play, so feel free to come at any time and join in on the fun.