student looks through telescope

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. 

Jennifer Haare (BA, ‘13, English; BA, ‘13, creative writing) and Jackie Furtado.

A GoPro, a book, and a horse named Tornado

Alumna shares the artistic journey that brought her from Arizona to Paris

At a calm trot, a horse’s hooves leave divots in the pale, rocky dirt. Under a brilliantly blue Arizona sky, one may wonder where the “tornado” from this artwork's title comes in. Then, the horse picks up speed, kicking up dust and pebbles in a chaotic storm. Some photos are entirely a blur. When the horse gallops through an amber creek, crystalline water droplets resemble a chandelier exploding into a million sparkling pieces. The reflecting sunlight paints streaks across frames.

“TORNADO” by U of I alum Jennifer Haare (BA, ‘13, English; BA, ‘13, creative writing) and Jackie Furtado is a chronophotographic artwork following a horse running through the desert. Chronophotography can be described as the bridge between photographs and cinema. It takes a sequence of images and orders them or overlays them, thus giving the feeling of movement in still art. 

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Haare and Furtado made “TORNADO” from over 100 frames of a video taken by a GoPro suspended under a horse. The sequence was released as a photobook, and for several months, a portion of the sequence was displayed in the Paris Cité University Galerie Richet. Haare shared the story behind “TORNADO,” how an artist gets their work to be seen, and how her time at U of I influenced her artistic journey.

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940 Feet series

Join LAS professors and students for a stroll on the Quad, and learn more about the influential people advancing our community.
Yasintorn Wongwoottisaroch.

What does the weather mean to you?

As a PhD student in mathematics who focuses on climate-related risk, Yasintorn Wongwoottisaroch thinks about the weather not just in terms of his outfit or commute. To Yasintorn, the weather is a commodity.

 Mark Lara and Zhuoxuan Xia.

Team tracks vegetation recovery from sudden permafrost collapse

In a new study of sudden permafrost collapses, Mark Lara, Zhuoxuan Xia and their colleagues found that vegetative cover returns much more quickly in low-Arctic sites than in high-Arctic and high-elevation sites.

Jasmin Patrón-Vargas.

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.

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.
Kara Federmeier
The meaningful milliseconds
 Psychology and neuroscience professor Kara Federmeier directs the Cognition and Brain Lab and co-leads the Illinois Language and Literacy...
war landscape
A global war without end
 World War II became a global war in 1942, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into the war. All the world’s most powerful nations were at war with one another, and the fighting spanned the globe.But the war was global in other ways too — in the unifying idea of a fight for...
Ngumbi in a greenhouse
Making science something to love
 Entomology professor Esther Ngumbi became interested in the chemical communication between plants and insects when she was growing up on her family’s farm in Kenya.“Halfway through the growing season, I would actually watch a lot...
Joseph Trujillo-Falcón
Researchers advance first-of-its-kind AI tool for translating life-saving weather warnings across the U.S.
 Nearly 69 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, yet weather warnings have long been issued almost exclusively in English. A new study documents how the National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to change that, developing a...
neurons dna
RNA barcodes enable high-speed mapping of connections in the brain
By tagging neurons with molecular “barcodes,” researchers mapped connections among thousands of neurons in the mouse brain with unprecedented speed and resolution. The approach could expand understanding not only of the layout of elaborate networks in the brain, but also how the brain...
Mark Lara, Zhuoxuan Xia
Team tracks vegetation recovery from sudden permafrost collapse
 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...