2025-10-30
- Psychology and neuroscience professor Kara Federmeier will deliver the 2026 Dean’s Distinguished Lecture at Alice Campbell Alumni Center 4 p.m. March 4, 2026.The Dean’s Distinguished Lecture series sets up an annual presentation from a...
2025-10-30 - The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has awarded funding to several faculty members through the Study in a Second Discipline Program, which gives professors time and support to push beyond their primary discipline and cultivate new scholarly tools. The program provides funding so that faculty members can...
2025-10-29 - In a discipline devoted to spaces, one of the most significant transformations came recently in Davenport Hall where a little-used room was converted to a new, state-of-the art geospatial laboratory thanks in large part to a generous donation from Candace Penn (BS, ’72, geography; MPA, ’94, Auburn University Graduate Air War College, Maxwell...
2025-10-24 - In a new paper, psychology professor Benedek Kurdi proposes a fresh approach to confronting implicit, or unintentional, bias in diverse organizations. He spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about the problems associated with efforts to “train” the bias out of people and offers practical guidelines for those hoping to...
2025-10-24 - Winds across Illinois are beginning to still. A new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers has found that average wind speeds across the state have declined over the past three decades—and that the prevailing wind direction is slowly shifting southward. The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, have significant implications for...
2025-10-23 - This fall, the Department of History welcomes Shannan Mason as a lecturer. Mason is a historian of early American history whose research explores relationships between science, nature, and economics. How people think about nature and how they treat it as an object instead of something that sustains life are questions that drive her research....
2025-10-23 - Benjamin Snyder, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been named a 2025 Packard Fellow by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.The foundation cites Snyder’s work “developing new methods to define and precisely control catalyst structure, and therefore function, at the atomic scale,” in naming him as one...
2025-10-21 - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists, including microbiology professor Asma Hatoum-Aslan, will partner with investigators from several industrial and academic institutions on a five-year, up to $28M initiative funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and overseen by program manager Andrew Brack....
2025-10-15 - Political misinformation or disinformation was the key reason for some U.S. couples’ recent divorces or romantic breakups, a new study found.Emily Van Duyn, a professor of communication, conducted in-depth interviews with 28 people who had recently ended a relationship with a partner whose political ideology did not match their own. Many...
2025-10-08 - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumnus Omar M. Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of three recipients of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yaghi received a PhD in chemistry from Illinois in 1990.Yaghi and his co-recipients, Susuma Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, are credited with...
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...