News at SDState

Isabel Dalton, a graduate student from the South Dakota State University Department of Natural Resource Management, has been accepted into the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

The South Dakota State University College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences will soon have an endowed position focused on swine production. The Rick Wahlstrom Endowed Chair in Swine Production will help support a faculty member whose research and leadership will elevate scholarly research productivity and advance teaching efforts within swine production at SDSU.

Jihong Cole-Dai, Distinguished Professor in South Dakota State University's College of Natural Sciences, is set to retire after more than two decades of service.

South Dakota State University, which has built a name for itself in the building of lunar rovers and prototypes, has found success in one of NASA’s longest-standing student challenges. An SDSU team consisting of five sophomores and one freshman finished second in the Human Exploration Rover Challenge at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, April 10-11. “In our first year of participating in the NASA HERC competition, we got second place in the remote-control division,” adviser and associate professor Todd Letcher said. First place went to the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

South Dakota State University researchers calibrated thousands of years of bison existence records with future projected weather patterns to forecast a significant northwest shift in suitable living conditions for the North American bison.

South Dakota State University’s annual Student Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Day will feature a wide range of student projects on April 14, including 14 undergraduate research projects funded by the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences for the 2025-26 school year.

South Dakota State University math and physics double major Mason Pulse of Salem has become only the 12th SDSU student to be selected as a Goldwater Scholar. This is the 40th year in which the Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation has presented awards to support talented college sophomores and juniors who aspire to become this nation’s next generation of researchers in science, engineering and mathematics. There are 454 awards being presented for 2026-27. The students were selected from a field of 1,485 students nominated by 482 schools. Pulse becomes the first SDSU recipient since Timothy Paris in 2020.

South Dakota State University's Oceti Sakowin language minor is the only such program in the South Dakota Board of Regents system, but it is one of many language revitalization programs nationwide.

For South Dakota State University pharmacy student Abigail Pape, the path toward becoming a pharmacist has been shaped by equal parts curiosity, connection and the desire to make a meaningful difference.

South Dakota State University professor Tyler Miller is the newly appointed director of the School of Psychology, Sociology and Rural Studies. He joined the SDSU faculty in 2012 after earning his Ph.D. in experimental cognitive psychology from Texas A&M University. Miller’s appointment will officially begin in June 2026.