LAS Executive Committee Election
Election to be held in late March 2026- voting deadline April 3, 2026.
Candidates
Electoral Group II
Candice Jenkins (AAS profile/English profile)
Candice M. Jenkins has been Head of the Department of African American Studies since 2023. She is Professor of African American Studies and English, and affiliate faculty with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She arrived at UIUC in 2014 after 13 years on the faculty at Hunter College, CUNY. She holds a B.A. in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in English from Duke University; her scholarship and teaching use a critical Black feminist lens to consider how African American cultural texts address questions of racial subjectivity, sexual politics, and class in the US. Campus-wide, she has served on the Faculty Non-Discrimination and Sexual Misconduct Appeals Committee for the Campus Office for Access and Equity (OAE); as a member of the Promoting Diversity and Inclusion Working Group as part of the 2019 Strategic Planning Process for the College of LAS, and as an interim member of the LAS Executive Committee (2021-22). Across both of her departments, AFRO and English, she has served on or chaired committees engaging with undergraduate curriculum, graduate admissions and graduate studies, specialized faculty, by-laws and departmental governance, faculty hiring, and served as the undergraduate advisor for AFRO from 2017-2022. She has also been elected twice to serve on the advisory committee for the English Department.
Gillen Wood (profile)
Gillen Wood is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC with appointments in the departments of English and Earth Science and Environmental Change, and is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Global Studies. He served a four-year term as Associate Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (2018-22) and is the founding director of the Certificate in Environmental Writing, co-sponsored by English, iSEE, and SESE. He is currently serving on the Liberal Arts Certificate Committee in LAS. He is the author of six books, three of which over the last decade have been devoted to the intersection of the history of science and environmental humanities. His 2014 book, Tambora, which was positively reviewed in both leading humanities and science journals, including Nature, won the Kendrick Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and in 2021 he was awarded a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship for his research on the history of oceanography. In recognition of his recently published book on the voyage of the HMS Challenger, he has been named a Fellow of the Scottish Association of Marine Science.
Electoral Group IV
Jane Desmond (profile)
Jane Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and Affiliate Faculty in the College of Veterinary Medicine, GWS, the Dance Department, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Prior to joining the UIUC faculty in 2007, she served on the full-time faculties of Cornell, Duke, and the University of Iowa where she was Associate Dean for International Studies and a CIC Leadership Fellow. She also held the Otto Salgo Chair in American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. Desmond’s research is interdisciplinary, crossing the humanities and social sciences with a focus on embodied practices, and making significant contributions to the development of three interdisciplinary fields: Performance Studies/ Transnational American Studies/ and Human-Animal Studies. She currently directs the Human-Animal Studies@Illinois Initiative which she founded through the Center for Advanced Study, and the International Forum for US Studies, which she co-founded. The author/editor of 5 books and numerous special journal issues, her work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, German and Spanish and published as well in India, the U.K. and Brazil. Desmond is Past President of the International American Studies Association and has recently held positions as a Fulbright Professor in Germany (2022), a British Academy Awardee (2023) and a 2024 Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical school. A committed teacher, her courses have been recognized on the list of Excellent Teachers at every level from 100 level to grad seminars to professional electives in the Vet School. She is passionate about building innovative interdisciplinary intellectual and creative communities on campus and with colleagues around the world. Desmond currently serves on multiple international advisory and editorial boards, and on campus, beyond a range of departmental committees, has served on the Advisory Board of HRI and is a member of the Distinguished Faculty Review Council in LAS.
Gisela Sin (profile)
Gisela Sin is Acting Director of the Illinois Global Institute. During the period 2020-2024, she was Directors of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois. She studies political institutions and how they interact with one another. She is the author of the award winning book Separation of Powers and Legislative Organization (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the coauthor of Congreso, Presidencia y Justicia en Argentina (TEMAS, 1999). Her research has been published in numerous journals and has presented her work at universities throughout Latin America and Europe, and was a scholar in residence at Universidad Católica de Chile, Instituto Iberoamericano Universidad de Salamanca, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, and a Fulbright Scholar in the United States. She is one of the founders of the Women in Legislative Studies, and board member of Women Also Know Stuff. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Universidad del Salvador in Argentina.
Charee Thompson (profile)
Charee M. Thompson is Professor of Communication in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of Biomedical & Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A University Scholar, she has also been recognized as a Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar and Helen Corley Petit Scholar. Her teaching has been recognized with the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Thompson brings leadership experience across the department, college, campus, and profession. In the Department of Communication, she has served on the Advisory Committee, Graduate Admissions Committee, and multiple search and review committees. At Illinois, she has served on the LAS Distinguished Faculty Review Council for Limited Submissions, as a first-generation student mentor, and on campus and OVCRI-related committees including the ad hoc committee reviewing misconduct procedures and service in research integrity. Nationally, she served as Chair of the National Communication Association’s Health Communication Division.
Electoral Group VI
Becky Fuller (website)
Rebecca (Becky) Fuller is a Professor and the Department Head of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois. Her administrative experience includes five years as Director of Graduate Studies (2017–2022) and four years as Department Head (2022-present). Fuller has served on the School of Integrative Biology’s Executive Committee, the Graduate College Executive Committee, the LAS General Education and Appeals Committees, and numerous search and review committees at the departmental, school, and university levels. She has participated in multiple leadership training programs, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance Department Executive Officers Program. In the classroom, she has been recognized repeatedly for excellence in teaching across undergraduate and graduate courses, including Ichthyology, Evolution, and The Analysis of Biological Data in R. Fuller’s scholarly work focuses on the evolution of signaling systems and speciation in fish. At the national level, she currently serves as President of the American Society of Naturalists, having previously held the roles of Treasurer, President-Elect, and Joint Meeting Committee Representative. She has served the Society for the Study of Evolution as a Council Member and on multiple award committees. Professor Fuller brings to the LAS Executive Committee a deep commitment to shared governance, faculty development, and the long-term health of our academic community.
Tracy Lawson (profile)
Tracy Lawson is a plant physiologist in the Department of Plant Biology with an affiliation with Crop Science and joined the faculty in January 2025 after 26 years at the University of Essex in the UK. Professor Lawson has more than 30 years of experience in photosynthesis research, has published over 197 peer‑reviewed papers, and has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate for the last 6 years. Prior to relocating to UIUC she held several senior leadership roles at the University of Essex, including Director of Impact (UKRI REF assessment criteria); Head of the Plant Group; Director of Essex Plant Innovation Centre; Director of Plant Phenotyping. She has trained numerous undergraduate and MSc students since securing a faculty position at the University of Essex in 2008, and mentored 23 PhD students to completion, and 16 postdoctoral researchers, with 6 of these currently running their own independent research programmes. She has taught courses in Plant Biology, Plant physiology, Phenotyping, Ecology and Marine Biology that have included both lectures and laboratory components, as well as international courses abroad. As part of international research and outreach activities she also re-established the SEB Plant Environmental Physiology group’s (PEPg) hands-on techniques workshop that brings industrial manufacturers and world experts together to train the next generation of scientists in the latest approaches and equipment in Plant physiology, as well as carrying out two training events in Thailand. Professional service includes: serving as an editorial board member for Plant Physiology, New Phytologist, The Plant Journal and Journal of Experimental Botany; a core panel member for BBSRC (2016-2020); external advisor for academic institutions, funding organisations and industry end-users; reviewer for several international funding agency, as well as previously President of the Society of Experimental Biology (SEB; 2022-2024); and currently treasurer for the SEB. Professor Lawson is committed to training and mentoring students for excellence in research and teaching.
Electoral Group VIII
Marius Junge (profile)
Professor Junge is mathematician working in different areas in pure to applied mathematics with 25 years of continuous support from NSF. Recently his interests shifted to quantum information science and consequently he is a member of IQUIST (Illinois Quantum Institute of Science and Technology). He has served on the Executive and PT Committee of the department of Mathematics several times. He is committed to self-governance as shown by his service in the academic senate for several years. This includes long time membership of the senate budget committee, and the student discipline committee. He was also the first chair of the research policy committee. For the college Executive Committee, his knowledge of the potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work and of different research cultures can be valuable. Note that he has served previously as a one-year substitute on the College of LAS Executive Committee before.
Yue Shen (website)
Yue Shen is a Professor of Astronomy. He has served, as member or chair, on the Astronomy Department’s executive committee, graduate admissions committee, courses and curriculum committee, strategic planning committee, capricious grading committee, and faculty search committee. He also served in the Senate and the LAS Courses and Curricula Committee. He frequently serves on NASA and NSF review panels and time allocation committees for national ground-based and space-based facilities. He joined UIUC in 2015 after PhD from Princeton (2009) and prize postdoctoral fellows at Harvard and Carnegie Observatories.
LAS Faculty Appeals Committee Election
Election to be held October 2026- voting deadline TBD
LAS Hiring Excellence, Aspiration, and Diversity (HEAD) Committee Election
Election to be held October 2026- voting deadline TBD