2019-10-31
- Jonathan Sweedler, the James R. Eizner Family Endowed Chair in Chemistry and director of the School of Chemical Sciences at Illinois, has been named to the top spot on the Analytical Scientist’s 2019 Power List, which highlights tremendous talent, ingenuity, and leadership in analytical science across the world...
2019-10-30 - Political disinformation campaigns on social media threaten to sway political outcomes, from U.S. elections to Hong Kong protests, yet are often hard to detect. A new study, however, has pulled back the curtain on one type of campaign called “astroturfing,” which fakes the appearance of organic grassroots participation while being secretly orchestrated and funded. The study suggests that the...
2019-10-29 - Corinne Cantwell Heggie was recently installed as president of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois. In addition to her duties as partner at a law firm in the northern suburbs of Chicago, she is spending her time addressing topics of interest to attorneys across the state, such as diversity, women and aging, and the 100th anniversary of women earning the right to vote in...
2019-10-24 - By the time Jonathan Gonzalez received his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas-El Paso, he’d mastered four languages: French, Italian, Russian, and English. By spending more than four hours a day studying language and literature, he’s come to appreciate them more deeply than most. “I see a foreign language like art more than a technical skill or a means of communication,” he said. “...
2019-10-23 - Urban commuters may be less likely to encounter automobile accidents if they are willing to increase trip time, researchers report. A new study from the University of Illinois introduces a tool that helps quantify the connection between traffic accidents and city road networks. The study, published in the journal Transportation Research Part C, used traffic speed, accident count, and trip origin...
2019-10-17 - A new book by a University of Illinois anthropologist studies the culture of contemporary business education – in particular, the MBA degree – and how it’s been shaped by the modern global economy. The book – “Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture” – is a study of “what MBAs learn about culture, and what that can tell us about contemporary global capitalism,”...
2019-10-16 - Kristin Lee Hoganson, a professor of history who has been at Illinois since 2000, has been named the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History. The position is named after Stanley Stroup, an Illinois alumnus who obtained his bachelor’s degree in history in 1966. Hoganson’s research focuses on U.S. foreign relations history and the history...
2019-10-15 - Jerrod Henderson (PhD ’10, chemical engineering) was a boy in Kinston, North Carolina, when he took a field trip that changed his life. Henderson went to the Black Engineer of the Year Awards and Conference in Baltimore as a sixth grader, and at first “I was walking around, grabbing different goodies on the tables,” he recalled. But when he came to the...
2019-10-15 - Pediatrician Alison Kirby (BS ’84, biology) was part of a 35-doctor practice in Walla Walla, Washington, when the principal of an alternative school first asked her to do free physicals for the kids joining their basketball team. Lincoln High School in Walla Walla is for students whose behavior or academic problems bumped them out of the main high school....
2019-10-15 - Billy Dec knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of help. When he wanted to come to the University of Illinois in 1991, he couldn’t afford it, so he drove down from Chicago and showed up at the financial aid office. A staff member noticed him looking distraught, and over the next few days this person walked him through the entire process of finding money to live on and go to school. “I...
2019-10-15 - When John Coady (BA ’74, political science) was a junior at Illinois in 1973, he ran for the newly created student seat on the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, but he said he lost to an opponent who outworked him. “After that, I vowed that I would never be outworked by any opponent in a political election ever again,” said Coady, who went on to a...
2019-10-15 - Hariklia Deligianni has applied her wits and education to finding solutions in everything from computing technology to solar energy, but one problem that hit too close to home came when her daughter, then 16, suffered a severe lower back injury while doing gymnastics. When Deligianni (MS, ’86; PhD, ’88, chemical engineering) learned that doctors were...
2019-10-15 - Billy Dec (BA, ’95, economics) was devastated when two of his family’s elders passed away on the same day—December 9, 2018. One of them, his grandmother’s sister, passed away in the Philippines, while his godfather died a world away in Chicago, with Dec at his bedside. “I suddenly realized that my grandmother, whom I had lost just after college, had...
2019-10-15 - The year 1980 was a turning point for LAS alum Peixin He (PhD ’85, chemistry). By 1980, China had been opening up to the world, and Peixin He was coming to the University of Illinois as a visiting scholar through an exchange program between Fudan University and Illinois. 1980 was also when He began to do research under Larry Faulkner, a professor...
2019-10-15 - In 1906, the German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer first identified amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain samples of a deceased woman who had suffered severe memory loss. Today, amyloid plaque and tangles are still indicators of what is now called Alzheimer’s disease—the most common form of dementia—but how they act in the brain remains a mystery 113 years later. Howard...
2019-10-14 - For students studying everything from Shakespeare to social issues facing minority populations, an underlying question is this: How will the things I’m learning in class help me in the future? A new center, established by the College of LAS, is designed to help humanities students realize their career possibilities. The Humanities Professional...
2019-10-09 - Inside certain classrooms at the University of Illinois, it's possible to go deep-sea diving to a sunken ship and witness a 100-foot blue whale—all without leaving Champaign County. With virtual reality equipment playing a growing role in classrooms, more and more students are seeing their learning experiences being transformed. Professors in the College of LAS have been implementing virtual...
2019-10-08 - It’s a vivid memory: At an open-air taverna in a small coastal town in Greece last summer, Alex Augustynski, junior in classics, made his acquaintance with a friendly black and white cat with green eyes and a deformed leg. Alex had spotted the female cat in Korfos, a remote port town where they had docked during an academic program. She was waiting...
2019-10-03 - Kohei Kishida works at the intersection of two fields that may appear to be unlikely partners — computer science and philosophy. The humanities and STEM are two academic paths that typically lead to very different outcomes, but the professor of philosophy combines quantum computing and philosophy to further research quantum computers. This year,...
2019-10-02 - From growing up on a farm in northern Iowa without indoor plumbing to graduating debt free with a doctoral degree at age 27, Ken Andersen knows the financial struggles endured by many college students who pursue higher education. That’s why the professor emeritus at the University of Illinois has created a new scholarship fund to support current students in the...
2019-09-30 - As he was transitioning out of his position as head of the Department of Political Science, Robert Pahre had no idea that his term would end with a surprise gift that would allow him to quite literally “pay it forward.” At the department’s first ever alumni awards ceremony in April 2019, members of the Board of Visitors, a political science alumni board,...
2019-09-27 - I am in Govindjee’s office suite and I don’t know where to look. Govindjee, a professor emeritus of plant biology who goes by the one name only, is a collector. There are layers of history here: artifacts and papers, books and photographs. There also are homemade scientific instruments that look like plumbing elbows, tiny satellites or props from...
2019-09-23 - Three departments in the College of LAS are part of a new nationwide initiative to change the culture surrounding doctoral education and career pathways. Led by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the PhD Education Initiative promotes student-centered doctoral education that will make the full range of career pathways available to PhD graduates...
2019-09-20 - The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is generating new sources of revenue while continuing to invest in education, research, and public engagement. Through the Investment for Growth initiative, 18 projects from colleges and institutes across campus, including four in the College of Liberal Arts...
2019-09-17 - Earlier this year, Erin Joe, after serving for more than two decades in the FBI, was named the director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, where she leads efforts to analyze and understand cyber threats to the United States. Making the nation safer is an all-consuming, round-the-clock endeavor, and what she learned from studying...