2025 Programming
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
UND Space Operations Summit Keynote Speaker
1:30 - 2:15 pm | UND Memorial Union
The Space Operations Summit (SoS) aims to bring together government, defense, and
industry space professionals, policy makers, researchers, educators, and students
to share and discover what’s happening across this domain.
Space operations are becoming increasingly complex and challenging as more actors
and activities enter the domain.
Cost: FREE - Open to all community members
Instructor Background:
Dr. Kavya K. Manuapu, is an explorer, space scientist, innovator, educator, and artist who has spent the past two decades advancing human spaceflight programs from low earth orbit to future Lunar and Mars exploration. Her career spans industry, government, and academia, with contributions in spacecraft design and launch, spacesuit testing, technology innovation, space analog missions, field expeditions, and international collaborations to democratize access to space.
Coming in 2026
The Role of AI in Health Care
Date and time TBA | Location TBA
The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform every aspect of our world is becoming increasingly evident, perhaps nowhere more so than health care. AI has the power to efficiently process data far beyond our own capacity, reducing the burden on health care providers and freeing up more time for patient engagement. The real power of AI to transform health care, however, may lie in the use of “supervised learning” to create deep learning models and neural networks that can find patterns that humans can’t see. Some of these patterns, derived from huge datasets, can detect diseases like cancer much earlier than is possible now, and can predict risk far better. This can potentially translate to thousands of lives saved.
But the promise of AI does not come without challenges, especially in health care. How much of what we hear is hype, how much is fear of change, and what are the real risks involved? Can AI that is developed in one part of the country be safely used in another with different patient populations? What can we do to prevent or remediate bias? Drawing on current, real-world examples in areas like patient diagnosis and treatment, mortality and disease progression prediction, and radiographic imaging, this presentation will provide answers to these questions and illustrate how AI is already being used to transform the health care sector.
FREE - Open to all community members
Instructor Backgrounds:
Richard Van Eck is the founding Dr. David and Lola Rognlie Monson Endowed Chair in Medical Education and Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS). His faculty development and research activities focus on evidence-based teaching, innovative teaching methods, games and learning, artificial intelligence, and telehealth. He provides support to the MD program on curriculum design, evaluation, micro-credentialing. Rick has a PhD in instructional design from the University of South Alabama, serves as the principal investigator (PI) on the American Medical Association’s Innovation grant (gamification for competency-based medical education) and previously served as the PI on the AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium projects on interprofessional telemedicine simulation. A frequent keynote speaker, presenter, and author of research on serious games, Rick has edited two volumes on interdisciplinary approaches to serious games and presented at TEDx Manitoba and SXSW.