2025-10-06
- College of LAS students Clara Alvarez-Leyva, Carlos Hernandez and Danielle Mitchell are recipients of the annual Voyager Scholarship, the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service.With part of her scholarship funds, Alvarez-Leyva, who is majoring in political science with a...
2025-10-06 - More than 40 tenure track professors are launching new careers this fall at the College of LAS, in fields from communication to astronomy and history, chemistry, economics, political science, linguistics, and many more. We caught up with a few of them to help capture the new angles of teaching and learning that have come to campus this semester. How organizations solve problems...
2025-09-26 - Scientists, government officials and participants from around the world gathered on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus for the grand opening of the National Science Foundation’s Illinois BioFoundry, or iBioFoundry, and the National Institute for Biofoundry Applications at the U of I.The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place...
2025-09-22 - One of the great challenges of ecology is to understand the factors that maintain, or undermine, diversity in ecosystems, researchers write in a new report in the journal Science. The researchers detail their development of a new model that — using a tree census and genomic data collected from multiple species in a forest — can predict future fluctuations in the relative abundance of those...
2025-09-18 - Cycles of deployment and reintegration can be stressful, disruptive times for military spouses and their families. Although the Department of Defense and its military communities offer a number of formal resources to help military spouses cope during these challenging periods, very few of those who participated in a recent study said they actually used them. Only 16.5% of those in the study...
2025-09-17 - Excessive alcohol consumption can disrupt the liver’s unique regenerative abilities by trapping cells in limbo between their functional and regenerative states, even after a patient stops drinking, researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators at Duke University and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago describe in a new study.This in-between state is a result of...
2025-09-11 - Some urban nightclubs in Chicago may charge Black patrons more for drinks compared with white patrons or use other tactics to discourage their patronage, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.Illinois sociology department head and professor Reuben A. Buford May investigated possible discriminatory...
2025-09-10 - Antibodies are the critical targeting agents of the immune system and the crux of immune therapy and vaccine development, but studying them is slow, expensive, and labor-intensive. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new high-volume method that can rapidly build and test large numbers of antibodies at once. With it, they have already uncovered...
2025-09-10 - President Donald Trump met recently with Russian president Vladimir Putin and with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to negotiate a settlement to the Russia-Ukraine war. The three leaders are all charismatic figures who know how to use their appeal to mobilize public opinion, said Richard Tempest, a professor of Slavic languages and...
2025-09-10 - Two professors in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been named University Scholars in recognition of their achievements in teaching, scholarship and service.The program honors faculty excellence and provides $15,000 to each scholar for three years to enhance their academic careers. That money may be used for travel, equipment, research assistants, books or other purposes.“The...
2025-09-08 - Christian Hasler (BA, ’22, anthropology) had dreams of working abroad in an archaeological field. Egypt, maybe. Certainly international. Somewhere with a storied history. However, she found that her own home state has a rich history waiting for investigation.Hasler is a scientific specialist of archaeology (or a lithic analyst) in...
2025-09-04 - The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences is launching an ambitious new Strategic Investment Program to accelerate innovation, elevate academic excellence, and modernize infrastructure across LAS.
2025-08-29 - English and African American studies professor Irvin Hunt thought twice before he answered a phone call from an unknown caller, but little did he know that it was about to change everything. It came from film director Kahlil Joseph, asking Hunt if he would be interested in writing a script for his newest...
2025-08-27 - It’s not easy for students to stay on campus during the summer to do research, but it can also be a prime opportunity for them to develop their interests. The 2025 Student Research Showcase, hosted in August by the Department of Chemistry, highlighted some of the research that occurred during the summer along with the scholarships and donors who...
2025-08-21 - In a new study, scientists used nearly every tool in their toolkit — genomics, transcriptomics, greenhouse experiments and advanced statistical methods — to gain new insight into the complex chemical interactions that take place in underground root nodules, where legumes like soybeans exchange vital nutrients with soil microbes called rhizobia.Reported in the Proceedings of the National...
2025-08-21 - Professor Stephanie Hilger is looking at how 18th century European medical doctors shaped perceptions of “hermaphrodites”—people who were deemed to have non-normative sexual genitalia—through case histories. Hilger’s new book, “Medicalizing difference: The eighteenth-century construction of the ‘...
2025-08-19 - Alumna Stacy Lynn (PhD, history, ’07) has spent nearly 30 years studying Abraham Lincoln and shares the story of the women who helped shape the 16th president into the person we know from history.“Loving Lincoln” details the stories of women from Lincoln’s life and how their...
2025-08-19 - When history graduate student Daniel Rodriguez applied for the Summer Bridge Program, created by the Humanities Without Walls initiative to give PhD...
2025-08-12 - With a new five-year, $15 million award, the U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed its support of the Molecule Maker Lab Institute, a research collaboration focused on developing artificial intelligence tools for quick, accessible discovery and synthesis of molecules for applications in medicine, energy, industry and more.Headquartered at the...
2025-08-07 - A group of students with a shared passion for neuroscience are writing about it for the greater good—and they’re getting noticed.Brain Matters is a student-run neuroscience journal created in 2018 by student Thomas Romanchek (BS, ’21, psychology and...
2025-08-07 - “Kids need this project now more than ever,” said history graduate student Alex Jacobs as she reflected on her summer working with a Champaign group that is developing a new private middle school for boys.Jacobs studies queer history and the British Empire in the 19th century, but she spent this summer exploring a different avenue of history...
2025-07-25 - The number of police-involved lethal force incidents in the U.S. dropped 24% from 2021 to 2023, according to research from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project has compiled nearly a decade’s...
2025-07-24 - Benign and cancerous calcium phosphate deposits that may look identical on a mammogram have distinct differences in their structures and formation processes, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Texas at Austin found in a new study that provides the first detailed descriptions of how calcifications form in...
2025-07-23 - For researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a new avenue for reducing carbon emissions can be found on the side.A side of salad dressing, that is.In 2020, the United States federal government committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. An important step toward carbon neutrality is embracing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), an alternative to...
2025-07-23 - Aaron Ammons clearly remembers the first time he saw discriminatory property covenants in Champaign County. For certain neighborhoods, the detailed, legally binding documents that governed everything from building materials to curb cuts also included this: No non-Caucasians could live there.What took his breath away, Ammons recalled, were the discriminatory covenants written by hand. Though...