Faculty honors

Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, a professor in the Department of entomology, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of her accomplishments in undergraduate teaching and her contributions to undergraduate learning. Harmon-Threatt’s work concerns ​​identifying and understanding patterns in natural environments to help conserve and restore pollinator diversity.

Alison Bell, a professor of evolution, ecology, and behavior, has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Bell will work toward developing a conceptual framework that integrates neural and gene regulatory networks to offer new insights into fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of behavioral diversity.

Bobby Smith II, a professor in the Department of African American studies, will receive the 2024 Humanities Research Institute Prize for Research in the Humanities, in the faculty category. His research is presented in “Food Denied, Food for Freedom: The 1962–63 Greenwood Food Blockade” a section from his book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.  Smith’s book analyzes how food was used as a weapon against African Americans during the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and how they created their own food programs and systems in response.

Charee Thompson, a professor in the Department of communication, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of her success in undergraduate teaching. Her research primarily explores two points of view: individuals’ understandings of their own health and individuals’ understandings of others’ health.

Christy Landes, a professor in the Department of chemistry, has been elected a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Landes is an experimental physical chemist who explores the structure-function relationships in biological processes to inspire innovations in materials design. She is also a recipient of the 2024 Kazuhiko Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics from the Biophysical Society.

Diwakar Shukla, a professor in the Department of chemical & biomolecular engineering, has received the 2023-2024 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, an award that recognizes outstanding research by associate professors during the past five years. Shukar’s research is focused on computational and experimental methods to understand biophysical processes for applications in plant biology and human diseases.

Eric Calderwood, a professor of comparative & world literature, will receive an honorable mention for the 2024 Humanities Research Institute Prize for Research in the Humanities, in the faculty category. His research is presented in “The Palestinian al-Andalus,” from his book On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, which studies how al-Andalus has been reinterpreted since the Muslim Nasrid Kingdom of Granada fell to the Castilians King Fredinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.

Julie Price, a senior lecturer in the Department of English, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of her excellence in undergraduate teaching. Price has been teaching at Illinois since 1998, and created a class called Trauma Writing in 2016. 

Katy Heath, a professor of plant biology, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Guiding Undergraduate Research for her excellence in supporting undergraduate students in exploring research opportunities. Many of Heath’s students have advanced to do doctoral work and pursue careers in the plant biology field. 

Konstantinos Kourtikakis, a professor in the Department of political science, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of his excellence and innovation in undergraduate teaching. Kourtikakis’ research explores different mechanisms of diffusion, such as social networks, the drafting of treaties, and electoral campaigns under the framework of governance theories, with the empirical focus of his work being the European Union.

Marshall Scott Poole, a communication professor, has been elected a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Poole’s research examines group and organizational communication, information and communication technologies, collaboration, organizational change and innovation, and theory construction. One of Scott’s current research projects, called the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium Project, studies communication and behavior in large multiplayer online games. 

Prashant Jain, a professor in the Department of chemistry, has received the 2024 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in recognition of his success in undergraduate teaching. Jain leads a laboratory on nanoscale light-matter interactions at Illinois, where he is also a University Scholar, a professor of the materials research lab, and an affiliate faculty member of Physics and Illinois Quantum Information Science and Engineering (IQUIST).

Rebecca Fuller, a professor of evolution, ecology, and behavior, has been elected a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research examines the evolution of fishes to better understand natural and sexual selection, genetic variation, and behavior. She has won multiple awards for her research, teaching, and mentorship, and is an affiliate of the Carl. R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.

Ying Diao, a professor in the Department of chemical & biomolecular engineering, has received the 2024 Owens Corning Early Career Award from the Materials Engineering & Sciences Division (MESD) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). This award recognizes outstanding independent contributions to the scientific, technological, educational or service areas of materials science and engineering. Diao will give an invited talk at the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting MESD Plenary session.

Emad Tajkhorshid, a professor in the Department of biochemistry, has received the Beckman Vision and Spirit Award, which recognizes a Beckman faculty member who shows the same spirit as UIUC founder and alumnus, Arnold Beckman, and has encouraged collaboration in their research. Tajkhorshid plans on using the funds from the award to improve Beckman’s computational power for the the projects students are engaged in, as well as add to the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group’s educational activities.

Brett Ashley Kaplan, a professor in the Department of French & Italian, has been appointed the Nannerl O. Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2023-2024, where she will deliver lectures and engage with students on UNC and Duke campuses. One of the two public lectures will be on April 15, 2024. Kaplan also directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Chadly Stern, an associate professor in the Department of psychology, conducts research on motivations and belief systems and how they affect people’s interpretation of the world. A key part of his work considers political belief systems and how they shape people’s assessment and categorization of others based on group membership.

Kathryn Clancy, a professor in the Department of anthropology, received the W.W. Howells Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association and a recommendation from the Scientific American for her book, PERIOD: The True Story of Menstruation (2023). The W.W. Howells Book Prize honors books in the realm of biological anthropology that represent the highest standard of scholarship and readability.

Helga Varden, professor of philosophy, was awarded the NAKS Senior Scholar Prize for her book Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Account. The NAKS Senior Scholar Prize is given annually to an excellent article or book that discusses any aspect of Kant’s philosophy.

Chunyuan Diao, professor of geography & geographic information science, has been named a 2024 Fellow of the American Association of Geographer. Her nomination materials note her effective teaching and leadership. Diao's award brings the total number of AAG fellows from the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science to five. 

Paul Hergenrother, the Deputy Director of Cancer Center at Illinois, is the first University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher to receive the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA). The award recognizes significant research accomplishments and supports investigators for 7 years with up to $600,000 annually in direct costs. Hergenrother’s lab is credited with discovering multiple anticancer compounds like PAC-1 and TEQ103.

Ghassan Moussawi, professor of sociology and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois, is the winner of the 2024 SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award. His nomination materials note his outstanding mentorship, his fight against injustice, and his advocation for his students.

Professor Kimberly Mack of the English department has been awarded a prestigious Public Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH fellowship is a highly competitive grant program that supports authors in their research and writing of nonfiction books in the humanities for the broad public. 

The American Mathematical Society recently announced the winners of the 2024 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. Five people were awarded the prestigious prize; among them was University of Illinois mathematics professor József Balogh. Balogh, along with his co-authors Robert Morris (Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada), and Wojciech Samotij (Tel Aviv University) received the award for their 2015 paper “Independent sets in hypergraphs,” published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

Justine S. Murison, professor of English, has received the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)'s 2023 Book Award for "Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States." The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is a non-profit organization of teachers and scholars of literature, language, and culture. 

Spanish and linguistics professor Silvina Montrul recently received two major honors. Her book "Native Speakers, Interrupted" (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has been selected as the winner of this year’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistics Society of America. Montrul was also ranked in the top two percent of the world's scientists, according to Stanford University. This prestigious ranking is based on the bibliometric information in the Scopus database and includes more than 190,000 researchers from all over the world out of about 9 million scientists. Montrul is listed at number 94, out of a sublist of 399 for linguistics.

Professor Harriet Murav has won a prestigious NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Award for her collaborative translation of “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.” She will work on an annotated English translation of ten Yiddish and Russian short stories written in the Soviet Union about the Soviet Jewish experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Murav is a professor in the Departments of Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Center for Advanced Study.

Professor Charles E. Sing of chemical and biomolecular engineering has been awarded the 2024 John H. Dillon Medal by the American Physical Society. Sing was recognized for "pioneering advances in polyelectrolyte phase behavior and polymer dynamics using theory and computational modeling."

Mithilesh Mishra, director of the Hindi and South Asian languages program in the Department of Linguistics, has received the Service to Hindi Award from the International Hindi Association, whose focus is on fostering the cultural heritage of India through promotion and propagation of Hindi and its literature. 

The Biophysical Society has announced that Christy F. Landes, Jerry A. Walker Endowed Chair and professor of chemistry, will receive the 2024 Kazuhiko Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics. Landes is being recognized for her exciting developments of single molecule measurement techniques, and their application to chemical and biological systems such as polymers and ion channels 

Communication professor Trina Wright-Dixon was honored as one of this year’s inductees into the Oracles Council for the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG). According to OSCLG’s website, this designation "honors its members who have made significant contributions to the organization and makes available to the membership their experiences as leaders, scholars, and mentors."

Xinzhu Yu, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology, has been named a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award from the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. This award "supports investigators at each career stage who propose innovative research that, due to their inherent risk, may struggle in the traditional NIH peer-review process despite their transformative potential."

Atul Jain, atmospheric sciences, was elected as an American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fellow. This program recognizes AGU members who have made exceptional contributions to Earth and space science through a breakthrough, discovery, or innovation in their field. He is one of just 54 individuals elected in the 2023 Class of Fellows.

Chemistry professor Jefferson Chan recently received a 2024 ACS National Award—the Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry. He received this award, which recognizes outstanding graduate students and their preceptors in the field of chemistry, for his mentoring of alumna Melissa Lucero (PhD, '22).

Renee Trilling, professor of English, recently received the Best Teaching Aid or Public Outreach award from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. The International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England has "over 500 active members from 20 different countries, ranging from graduate students just starting their careers to the most established scholars in the field."

Wendy Heller—Executive Associate Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Area Centers for the College of LAS and a professor of psychology—has been reappointed to the Presidential Fellowship program for Fall 2023. She will serve as an advisor to the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Nicholas Jones, and President Killeen on matters relating to system-wide strategic initiatives, with special emphasis on fostering leadership of women across our system.

History professor Robert Morrissey has won 2023 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize from the Western History Association for his recent book, "People of the Ecotone." This award is given annually for the best book in western environmental history defined in its broadest sense.

Jane Desmond, professor of anthropology and affiliate faculty with the College of Veterinary Medicine, has been selected for a 2023-2024 Fellowship in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, a program designed for a dozen thought leaders selected from among applicants from around the world who wish to deepen their work in bioethics. Fellows are chosen on the basis of their previous academic achievements and the contributions they will likely make to the field of bioethics. Desmond will also hold a semester-long international Visiting Fellow research award from the British Academy for fall 2023. During this time she will be in residence at the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham in the U.K.

The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences have announced three 2023 laureates of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists and the finalists for the award, which include Illinois chemistry professor Prashant Jain.

Aaron Benjamin and Alejandro Lleras (pictured), both faculty members within the Department of Psychology, have received the 2023 Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society. The purpose of the Mid-Career Award is to raise the visibility of psychology and of mid-career scientists who are making excellent scientific contributions to the field.

Chemical & biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su has been awarded the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Separations division FRI/John G. Kunesh Award. The recipient of the award is chosen on the basis of their significant discoveries, important research, development of new products and processes, their introduction of new educational concepts, service to the separation division and community.

Merle Bowen (pictured), professor of African American studies, and Ying Diao, professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering, have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service. The award is presented by the University of Illinois System to faculty members from the Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana universities.

Scott Althaus, professor of political science and communication and director of the Cline Center, has received the 2023 IJPP Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award for "Building Theory in Political Communication."

The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology has honored Charles Schroeder, professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering, with its 2023 Beckman Institute Vision and Spirit Award. The award honors Beckman Institute Founder Arnold Beckman by recognizing a faculty member who has fostered collaboration in their research and exemplifies his vision.

John Levi Barnard (pictured) and Julie Gaillard, faculty members from the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, have received a Prize for Research in the Humanities from the Humanities Research Institute. These prizes recognize outstanding humanities research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

History professor Yuridia Ramírez (pictured) and Latina/Latino studies professor José de la Garza Valenzuela have been awarded 2023 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships.

Bo Li, a professor of statistics, has been awarded the ASA Section on Statistics and Environment (ENVR) Distinguished Achievement Award for 2022. 

Carol Symes (pictured), professor of history, and Prashant Jain, professor of chemistry, have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service. The award is presented by the University of Illinois System to faculty members from the Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana universities.

Psychology professor Kara Federmeier, atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain, and chemistry professor Liviu Mirica will be awarded the distinction of 2022 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellows are chosen by their peers for outstanding contributions to the field.

Humanities Research Institute director and history professor Antoinette Burton has been named to the Illinois Humanities board of directors. Illinois Humanities, the Illinois affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a statewide nonprofit organization that activates the humanities through free public programs, grants, and educational opportunities that foster reflection, spark conversation, build community, and strengthen civic engagement.