Advancing our community
LAS influence
The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is filled with accomplished, thoughtful, and dedicated faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose work influences many advancements throughout our community. LAS strives to address the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges through indispensable research, innovative courses, and an ingrained focus on diversity.
Read on to learn how the College of LAS is advancing our community in Urbana-Champaign and beyond.
Team tracks vegetation recovery from sudden permafrost collapse
New study of sudden permafrost collapses found that vegetative cover returns much more quickly in low-Arctic sites than in high-Arctic and high-elevation sites
Some Arctic regions regain their “greenness” within a decade of a sudden permafrost collapse, while others can take a century or more to recover, researchers report in a new study. The difference is directly related to each site’s gross primary productivity, a measure of its photosynthetic capacity, the researchers discovered. This finding will allow scientists to accurately predict how long it will take a specific site to recover after a permafrost collapse.
The new findings appear in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study focused on a phenomenon known as retrogressive thaw slumps, “the sudden, landslide-like features that sometimes occur when permafrost thaws,” said Mark Lara, a professor of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Zhuoxuan (Summer) Xia, and Liu Lin, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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Thaw slumps occur when ground ice melts, suddenly destabilizing parts of the terrain. Individual slumps can affect many acres of territory, and the soil surface can shift or drop by hundreds of feet. Slumps uproot, erase and displace much of the plant life that was there before and cause soil-carbon losses, Lara said.
940 Feet series
Join LAS professors and students for a stroll on the Quad, and learn more about the influential people advancing our community.
Alumna Jasmin Patrón-Vargas strives for big causes in her career as a professor
Alumna Jasmin Patrón-Vargas said her degree in Latina/Latino studies and gender and women's studies was "foundational" to her career and sparked her commitment to studying social structures and educational justice.
David Wright Faladé's story, based on personal experience, took a long journey from idea to publication
English professor David Wright Faladé’s new short story in The New Yorker examines the racial, class and gender tensions in his Texas hometown.
How a graduate geology course uses tree rings to read Earth's climate history
At the core of Hưng Nguyễn's Geology 593 graduate-level special topics class,“Tree Rings and Climate,” was the idea that trees are more than biological organisms—they are environmental archives. “Trees are time machines,” Nguyễn said. “The wood will record anything that the trees experience in an environment.
Faculty research
The College of LAS has more than 600 faculty experts working on the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges. Learn about their work.
