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.

Electronics inspired by plants

Ying Diao discusses research on chirality and energy efficiency

Ying Diao, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering shares with LAS news intern Adrien Reetz how she ended up researching chirality, what chiral electronics are, and what impact they could have in the future.

The Diao research group, started in 2015, takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying molecular assembly processes. Molecular sciences, directed assembly, polymer processing, additive manufacturing, and device engineering all play into this research, which can be found on the publications page of the group website.

Diao now studies how chirality — asymmetry in molecules and physical structures — might be able to make electronics more energy-efficient.

The inspiration comes from the natural world, where chirality allows plants to perform photosynthesis with near-perfect energy efficiency and might help our brains to operate at supercomputer levels without anywhere near as much energy wasted as heat.

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Could you describe your journey to your current area of research? Is this where you always thought you’d end up, or has your career taken some surprising turns?

Definitely quite some turns. We started here in 2015, focusing on additive manufacturing of functional polymers, and we have transitioned a few times. In 2020, we received major funding from NASA, and we started working on developing wearable electronics for plants so that we can facilitate growth of vegetables in outer space for extraterrestrial agriculture.

More recently, we pivoted from electronics for plants to plant-inspired electronics, owing to a serendipitous discovery. That’s a whole new world where more than half of my group has been focusing on.

940 Feet series

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

Watch series

How does the film ‘The Odyssey’ compare with Homer’s epic poem?

Classics professor Eduardo García-Molina discusses how “The Odyssey” film compares with Homer’s epic poem and the story’s relevance today.

Finding could reduce effort required for time-consuming and critical task

A new study led by Illinois professor Joseph Trujillo-Falcón documents how the National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive translation program that delivers life-saving forecasts and alerts in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Samoan, French and other languages.

Jennifer Haare with her project partner, Jackie Furtado.

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

“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.

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.

Wings of bioinspiration

The first lesson Marianne Alleyne learned from working with engineers had nothing to do with insects.It had to do with language."Actually doing interdisciplinary research or transdisciplinary research is really difficult," said Alleyne, a professor of...

New book studies ‘persistent citizens’ of the Global South

A new book co-written by a U of I expert who studies development and governance explores the “state-centric persistence” of poor citizens of the Global South in their individual pursuit of benefits from government-run social welfare programs such as public healthcare and early childhood...

Emotion-regulation training reduces distress, changes the brain, team reports

A five-week training intervention taught college students to better regulate their emotions in response to negative events, a new study finds. After the training, the students reported less emotional distress when viewing negative images or thinking about difficult events from their own...

Illinois professor’s book examines contradictions in history of U.S. naturalization processes

Naturalization is a process that is typically celebrated as the end point on the path to U.S. citizenship. Immigrants choose to attach themselves to our nation, which extends to them its rights, freedoms and opportunities.A new book looks at naturalization from a different angle, considering...

Volatile weekly work hours have adverse effects on health, employment

Workers who juggle volatile work hours that change from week to week may experience adverse health effects that impact their ability to work, although the limitations vary by gender, say researchers who conducted a recent study. Men who experienced greater fluctuations in their work hours...

National Park Service grant supports Observatory rehabilitation

The University of Illinois Observatory is undergoing renovations this summer that will bring back some historical features of the national landmark.The project is supported by a grant from the National Park Service through the Save America’s Treasures program, which funds the preservation of...