At the center of her most recent course, Science, Media and Social Impact, is how science interacts with the media and public perception. At the core, Eichmeier challenges her class to ask: Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge?

“We are in a place where we have a fragmented media environment with lots of voices,” Eichmeier said. “Some of whom say things that might not align with our consensus of science.”

“She taught me to enter conversations and debates with a firm knowledge of where my expertise lies, and to always explore issues with an open mind, exploring all possible perspectives with an understanding that all issues interact and overlap with society and human communication,” said Elleson Connelly ’28, a chemistry major who is also the communications chair of the Creative Writing Club.

In an article published in 2024, Eichmeier dives into how to communicate science to audiences with low engagement in science and technology during her study of how the “Last Week Tonight” show enhanced the audience’s knowledge on gene editing. That research helps form her class structure.

“In science communication, the natural inclination for people is that knowledge comes from scientists, doctors or other people tangentially involved in other fields that touch science,” Eichmeier said. “But the key point is that our media system has enabled new voices in that discussion of who decides what is knowledge.”

Rather than presenting science as a set of facts, Eichmeier emphasizes how knowledge is curated by media, culture and power.

“But we know that communicating science is so much more than giving facts,” Eichmeier said. “When it involves people having power, or making policies, we know that science doesn’t remain politically free and neutral.”

From public health to emerging technology, students explore how information is communicated and interpreted across audiences.

Centered on discussions, Eichmeier creates a focus on student participation through an expression of critical thinking.

“Within the entirety of my class, is this whole idea of who makes knowledge and what does it mean when knowledge becomes a policy or the way that we operate in society?” Eichmeier said.

Eichmeier encourages students to question assumptions; her course welcomes students from a range of majors who contribute different perspectives to complex topics.

Natulia Momo ’27, who has Eichmeier as an adviser through the St. Thomas student-led news outlet The Crest, described Eichmeier as bubbly and empathetic.

“I think what makes students feel comfortable, whether it’s working or talking to (Eichmeier) is that she’s always giving us the space to talk about something that we’re interested in, and she always wants to hear our ideas on things,” Momo said. “Her conversations always come with jokes, which brings laughter so all of that really makes the relationship less intimidating or awkward.”

Reflecting today’s challenges in media, Eichmeier calls attention to the challenges students will face in the current media landscape and navigating a wide range of sources.

Eichmeier guides students to think about how people form beliefs, especially when intuition is in play.

“One of my arguments in my latest paper was that we have people who want to use their intuition,” she said. “If you trust your intuition to tell you what’s fact and what’s not fact, do you need the rest of the facts?”

A senior at the University of St. Thomas, he grew up listening to Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin with his dad, who has a collection of guitars on the wall. Now Barrett is a fan of Pink Floyd, John Mayer, and many more rock 'n' roll artists.

In high school, he would flip through photobooks and find images of his dad sporting long hair and a two-necked electric guitar, his twin brother on the drums. At the time, Barrett only played the saxophone.

"I just picked up one of his guitars and started learning," he said.

After buying his own guitar, Barrett got a taste of performing it live in his freshman year of high school. He put together a band and learned 30 seconds of various rock songs to play during time-outs at basketball games.

When look for colleges in the Midwest, the combination of contemporary and classical music programs at the St. Thomas caught his eye. Across his four years as a music business major, with a double-minor in business analytics and recording arts, he has cultivated a community of creative expression.

He found the Pop & Rock club and the student-led record label 480 Collective and began stage managing live events and forming his own band Monarch.

"I've learned that I was passionate about providing people with new musical experiences and also connecting people together to form their own musical groups," Barrett said.

His passion takes shape through the 480 Collective, a student-led record label that began as a capstone course with access to the Schoenecker Center recording studio. Barrett merged his responsibilities with Pop & Rock to lead the collective.

"We decided to form a record label with the purpose of empowering new artists with the resources needed to launch their musical careers," he said.

In the 2024 spring semester, the label signed 11 artists for the first compilation album, Vol. 1, and 12 artists for Vol. 2 in the fall. Currently, the label has 7 upcoming artists for the fall 2025 release.

Barrett hopes that the 480 Collective will continue to grow after he graduates, establishing itself into events like Tommie Fest and Homecoming.

Aside from campus performances, the 480 Collective collaborates with Live Nation for concert ticket giveaways as a way to build relationships with students who may not play music.

"It's impactful and it makes people happy, so I really want that to continue," said Barrett, who plants to take the Law School Admission Test and pursue entertainment law.

"One of the things that I really admire about Ben is that he is incredibly good as rallying people together towards a common goal," said Charlie Sedgwick, who met Barrett during the first week of his sophomore year, bonding over their similar tastes in music and love for the guitar. They worked together on the 480 Collective and other music projects.

"During all of these projects, I found Ben to be a great collaborator and an effective leader and communicator," Sedgwick said. "He always makes sure that others can understand him and that he can understand others."

Music has always been a shared experience for Barrett, and managing live shows is only a snippet of his expertise. Performing with his band, Monarch, unveiled his guitar prowess.

Monarch began in Pop Music Collective, a first-level music course at St. Thomas, under the name Stone Soup. As the group became official, they renamed the band and played their first show at St. Paul Rock Music Lounge. The band release two songs, "Commodity" and "Dying Out Loud."

His skill as a musician has led to leadership opportunities beyond campus.

"He teaches group guitar lessons to Minneapolis kids from a variety of backgrounds, including some who don't speak English," Mared Stoddard Mack, a coordinator in the Department of Music, Film and Creative Studies, said about how Barrett teaches at Guitarra En El Barrio in Minneapolis, a guitar program for Latin children.

"Rather than shying away from this challenge," she said. "Ben has figured out how to connect through guitar, using music as a way to build bridges and find a common bond."

In his nomination letter for Barrett, Chris Kachian, a professor of guitar studies and harmonica at St. Thomas, said, "Mr. Barrett has proven himself to be an individual of the highest order both of character and scholarship. He is a leader in our department and easily earned the respect of his peers and the faculty."

Through the Maxfield internship program, scholars work directly with young learners while developing the skills and confidence needed to pursue careers in teaching and other youth-focused professions.

The Maxfield-DFC internship was founded through a SEED grant awarded to the University of St. Thomas School of Education’s Special Education Department and is now supported through a private donation. The goal of the internship is to create a pathway for students interested in the teaching profession and in working with young people to make a real impact.

By placing interns in classrooms with experienced mentor teachers, the program allows students to learn through observation, practice and reflection while receiving consistent support from supervisors.

During the 2025-26 school year, five Maxfield interns are actively learning and growing in the classroom while also participating in weekly professional development workshops designed to strengthen their instructional skills, classroom management strategies and knowledge of child development.

The combination of hands-on experience and guided training allows interns to progress quickly and take on meaningful responsibilities as the year goes on.

“Because our interns receive weekly professional development, they develop skills at a really impressive pace,” said Molly McGraw Healy, St. Thomas senior director of strategic partnerships. “At this point in the year, it is amazing to see our interns interacting with students, leading small groups, and supporting their host teachers. They are true educators.”

For many interns, the experience has been both meaningful and motivating. Fatima Barranca Romero, one of this year’s interns, shared that working closely with students has been the highlight of her internship.

“A highlight for me in my internship has been supporting students in their reading, math, and behavioral development. It has been incredibly rewarding,” she said. “Every time I walk into the school, I’m greeted with, ‘Ms. Fatima, I missed you. I’m so happy you’re here,’ which reminds me why this work matters. I’ve been able to closely shadow my mentor and observe how she teaches, manages the classroom, and responds to student behavior. The support of my mentor and supervisors, Kellie and Molly, who have supported DFC students throughout their journey in education, makes this experience even more meaningful to me.”

The internship has also helped interns explore different career pathways within education.

“I do plan to explore this industry more as a career pathway by learning about the different career fields in education, from teaching to social work or becoming a therapist for children,” Fatima said. “I have become very passionate about children’s development, and this is a great opportunity to explore all the different pathways. I hope to major in elementary education next year at the University of St. Thomas. I hope I can become a teacher one day and continue to support children, my community, and create a positive change within the education field.”

Program leaders hope the partnership with Maxfield will continue to inspire future educators and strengthen the connection between students and the profession.

“I hope interns will continue to be an important part of our collaborative work at Maxfield, and that many of them will discover education as a field that brings them professional and personal joy,” Molly said.

Through meaningful mentorship, real classroom experience and ongoing professional development, the Maxfield internship program continues to open doors for students who are passionate about working with young people and making a difference in the field of education.

From the article:
Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, oversees a clemency clinic there, supervising a half dozen law students as they pursue commutations and pardons.

Osler developed an interest in clemency after serving as a federal prosecutor in Detroit during the late ’90s. His caseload was heavy with crack cocaine prosecutions that carried long mandatory minimum sentences and fell disproportionately on African American defendants. The punitive approach, he came to believe, conflicted with his Christian faith, in particular the admonition in John 8:7: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

He told me, “I felt the weight of the stone in my hand. I put it down and walked away and did mercy.”

Osler’s clinic is currently seeking a commutation for an 83-year-old Texas man who was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1985 for helping run a drug ring. He’s confined to a wheelchair and recently suffered a stroke, but his crimes occurred so long ago that he is not eligible for compassionate release.

Another client, this one seeking a pardon, is a Kentucky woman who was sentenced to 57 months in 1996 for nonviolent drug crimes. She was released in 2001 and has been unable to receive licenses for several professions, including as a physical therapist and a real estate agent, because of rules that exclude convicted felons.

Osler has watched with increasing frustration as his clients’ petitions go unanswered. He described the pardon attorney as “a zombie office, in the sense that they’re assigning numbers to cases that come in, but it’s not clear that anything’s happening beyond that.”

Rather than receiving good or bad news for clients, Osler said, “you simply don’t hear. There’s no up, and there’s no down. And so, when they call from prison or they write, I have to tell them it’s pending. But, really, that means it’s being ignored.”

When I asked Osler which pardons bothered him most, he said, “It’s those that have gone to the people who are fabulously wealthy. These are the people who have been advantaged by so much. With my students, we’ve told the stories of people who are fabulously poor and are being ignored.”

Clemency, Osler continued, “has begun to take the form that the worst parts of government have already had, which is to be dominated by lobbying. It’s been OK if you are a polluter to hire people who are connected to the president to inveigh on your behalf and pay them tons of money. That wasn’t how clemency worked. But now that kind of ugly fog has floated over to what’s supposed to be about mercy.”

From the story:
University of St. Thomas Economics Professor Tyler Schipper says even if both the federal and state gas taxes were put on hold, the price of gas in Minnesota would still be higher than it was before the Iran conflict started.

“We might not see gas prices where they were before the Iran conflict until 2027,” Professor Schipper said.

Schipper is also concerned that higher gas prices are also leading to higher inflation for the U.S. economy as a whole.

The latest Consumer Price Index released Tuesday morning showed the annual inflation rate increased to 3.8%, the highest since May of 2023.

Back in February, before the conflict in Iran began, inflation was sitting around 2.4%

“Unfortunately it means that people are probably going to have to settle in for higher prices, not only for things that you buy when you go to the gas station, but also the retail store, the grocery store those prices are also going to start to rise,” Professor Schipper said.

He suspects the Federal Reserve isn’t going to lower interest rates any time soon, and he isn’t expecting any relief right away for gas prices either, because he says even if the conflict ends tomorrow it would take some time for prices to go back down.

From the conversation:
Nina Moini: ... What are some of the concerns people raise when they see investors building some of these higher end or larger, newer single-family homes to rent? 

Russ: I think the concern when new products, especially products that may feel out of reach to many current members of that community, go up – there’s inevitably a concern of, how do I fit into this? Where does this leave my community? And a couple of things that we know are in general, when we have affordability issues, it’s typically because we have too few choices, not too many. 

Also, brand-new housing is always generally going to be the most expensive type of housing. That is just the nature of having to build something new. That doesn’t mean, though, that there are no community impacts to be considered. But the primary challenge as a region that we’re facing is not necessarily too much of one type of housing. It’s really too little housing overall. 

The Minneapolis Fed did another study very recently. And they showed that on three metrics of housing goals for the Twin Cities region, we were not meeting, as a region, those goals. So for example, we need to build about 18,000 units of housing a year to maintain a sufficient level of housing and a range of choices. Last year, we built about 12,000. 

So overall, we know that more production and more maintenance and investment in existing housing at all income levels helps decrease pressure on the market. That, however, does not necessarily mean that every new product is going to fit every income level. We have separate and important tools that we can and should use more of to reach all income levels. 

Moini: I wonder, do you see any positives to this? ... Looking ahead, do you foresee these built-to-rent neighborhoods becoming a bigger part of Minnesota’s housing landscape, or do you think it’s going to remain more of a niche market? 

Russ: I think time will tell ... but a few trends we know overall with housing is there has been increased consolidation, not just of ownership, but really of management. And counterintuitively, that is in part because owning and managing rental housing has become an increasingly regulated and sophisticated industry. So it’s increasingly difficult for the mom-and-pop landlords to rent out maybe their home that they moved out of. ...

The fourth annual summit, hosted April 16 by the Morrison Family College of Health, brought together more than 200 healthcare professionals, nonprofit leaders, students, faculty and community advocates around the theme “Resilience Rooted in Strength.” Sessions throughout the day explored how resilience is sustained not only in individuals, but across healthcare systems, workplaces and communities.

One of the summit’s featured speakers was epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who earlier this year was named to TIME’s 2026 TIME 100 Health list, recognizing the world’s most influential leaders in health. Osterholm discussed his work with the Vaccine Integrity Project and the challenge of rebuilding public trust in science and healthcare systems during moments of uncertainty.

Psychiatrist and author Henry Emmons also explored the science behind resilience, while other sessions focused on food justice, stress, movement, breathwork and restorative approaches to well-being.

“I see whole person health as more than a model of care,” said Melanie Ferris, director of Health Equity and Strategic Partnerships at the Morrison Family College of Health. “It is reflected in how we care for ourselves and how we nurture well-being within our communities.”

That broader vision came into focus during one of the summit’s powerful conversations, when leaders connected to St. Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood described resilience not as an abstract idea, but as something shaped by lived experience.

“When you drive on 94, you’re driving through somebody’s living room,” said Jonathan Palmer, executive director of the Rondo Center of Diverse Expressions, referring to the interstate project that cut through the heart of the neighborhood in the 1960s.

Panelists spoke about homes and businesses lost to the freeway project, the generational wealth that disappeared with them, and the emotional toll that still lingers decades later. But they also spoke about what endured: community ties, cultural memory and the determination to rebuild.

“This wasn’t an accident,” St. Paul City Council Member Cheniqua Johnson said of the highway’s construction through the neighborhood. “It was an intentional dismantlement of communities.

That balance between trauma and healing echoed throughout the summit, which also included opportunities for reflection and self-care through sound baths, listening sessions, forest bathing meditations and workshops centered on breath, movement and sound.

“These opportunities are why the Summit brings health professionals and community leaders together,” Ferris said. “We intentionally create space for attendees to learn, connect, reflect, and prioritize their own wellbeing.”  

This year’s event was made possible through the support of sponsors, including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, The George Family Foundation, Delta Dental, the Lorenz Clinic, and YMCA of the North.  

The fifth annual Whole Person Health Summit will take place on April 14, 2027.  

From the article:
A small but growing cohort of community colleges has found the blueprint for supporting underserved students through the early rungs of higher education and toward earning a bachelor’s degree. ...

At Dougherty Family College in Minnesota, 70% of graduates have either enrolled in or completed a four-year degree since 2019, says dean Buffy Smith.

Arrupe and Dougherty are part of the Come to Believe Network, a group of six community colleges dedicated to providing holistic and personalized support to first-generation and minority students. Each college is embedded within a four-year university, providing graduates with a seamless onramp to a bachelor’s degree program. ...

“Many (colleges) are not providing the infrastructure that scholars need to be successful in these institutions,” Smith says. “Our job is to make sure we provide the academic and social supports to ensure our students don’t survive college, but thrive.”

Each student at Dougherty Family College receives one-on-one mentoring from an assigned faculty or staff member to navigate the “hidden curriculum” that first-generation learners struggle to access, such as academic and career advising.

From the conversation:
Rege: One has to understand that these data centers consume a lot of resources. So all of these thousands of servers generate a lot of heat, and many of them, many of these data centers are also water cooled, so they consume millions of gallons of water. Secondly, also there could be impacts on your utility bill, so your electricity bill can go up as well.

So many times, these projects are also announced under a code name, and residents have no idea about who’s behind it and what the impact would be eventually. And suddenly, it is announced that maybe Google or Meta is behind it.

So there is also controversy surrounding that, that is the residents do not have an idea about the impact it is going to have today, as well as 10 years down the line, when the power grid needs upgrading, and who’s going to pay for it.

Courtney Godfrey: And supporters of this would say, well, but these data centers will bring jobs to your area. They will fuel the tax base. So there is an argument to be made for them as well.

Rege: Right. So there is an upside to having data centers. One is that it brings revenue in when you open up a data center. Let me talk about the jobs first. You know, there is this misconception that a data center brings long-term, permanent jobs. A data center is a large, gigantic, windowless building housing thousands of servers. So when that data center is getting constructed, there could be construction-related HVAC and civil engineering-related jobs. But once the data center is already in place, you will have fewer, maybe like 100 IT infrastructure-related jobs, but not thousands of jobs on a long-term basis. But it does bring an influx of funds into that local community, which could then be utilized for other purposes, such as in school districts, for example.

Godfrey: I mean, so many people are against these data centers going in, but I also don’t see our lifestyle changing. If we don’t change our lifestyle and we don’t build the data centers, what happens?

Rege: What happens is that we will not be able to serve that demand. So every time you make a request online, you go to ChatGPT, it goes to a regional data center. So if you don’t have that regional capacity, it will go to a far-off data center. There could be slowness in response times, and eventually consumers will not be happy as well.

From the article:
Three Minnesota influencers recently experienced the fickle nature of internet fame. One day, they were garnering lots of likes. The next, they were crushed under a digital dogpile. ...

To some degree, all three influencers cut through the digital noise and became famous online by distilling complexity and repeating the message, which appeals to our brains’ desire for coherent explanations, said Peter Gregg, associate professor and chair of the Emerging Media Department at the University of St. Thomas. 

The psychology of followers’ desire to “know” influencers and feel a sense of belonging also underpins our strong sense of connection, he explained.

“We get that little bit of dopamine, that little bit of happy juice that says, ‘Wow, this person’s really doing great stuff. I can’t wait to see what he does next, because I like him.’ Or ‘I feel like he’s one of us.’ Or ‘I would love to be part of his group,’” Gregg said. ...

Viewers who don’t know these influencers personally are often quick to draw conclusions from incomplete information and pass judgment based more on vibes than facts.

This tendency, Gregg said, again stems from the way social media distorts how we experience reality. Because curated video clips posted online aren’t occurring in real time, and only include the highlights of what happened, that leaves “slippery spaces for our mind to explain, account for, justify the actions that we see,” Gregg said.