2025-05-29
- To hear Kenn Allen tell the story, it seems like happenstance.
It started with an announcement in “The Daily Illini.”
In 1963, campus was launching a new organization focused on student volunteering within the Champaign-Urbana community, and Allen was a sophomore struggling to find his place on campus.
“I was not a particularly committed student,” he explained. “I lived in...
2025-05-29 - On May 5, 1992, a diverse coalition of more than 450 people, mostly students, gathered in and around the U of I’s Henry Administration Building with the goal of increasing institutional support for Latina/o students and programs on campus.The students called for the creation of a Latina/Latino studies program, hiring additional Latina/o faculty, staff, and...
2025-05-29 - Imagine pushing a button and watching as a digital philosopher chooses a topic, does the research and writes a professional-level, publishable work—all without human intervention. It’s an intriguing idea that’s currently being explored by Kevin Scharp, professor and research director at the Department of Philosophy, and fellow philosophy professor...
2025-05-28 - Lakisha Tawanda David’s career represents, in many ways, a lifelong search for identity.David, a professor of anthropology, uses her research to reunite those with severed ties to their ancestry through DNA connections. One branch of her work utilizes computational genetic genealogy to recreate family trees that have been lost to history. The other...
2025-05-28 - Shaowen Wang, professor of geography and geographic information science and associate dean for life and physical sciences in the College of LAS, discusses the dramatic advancement of his work and field. What are you studying? My research is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and data science approaches to...
2025-05-28 - “I was absolutely gassed,” said Laura DeBruler Santos, recalling the intense volleyball game against perennial national champion Penn State back in September of 2010. She was still recovering from a bout with mono and wasn’t at full strength. Coach Kevin Hambly gave DeBruler Santos (BS, ’11, psychology) a rest because she didn’t play well in the...
2025-05-27 - For Ljubica Basica (BA,’18, history and political science; MBA,’23), a project manager at Google with Mandiant Cybersecurity Consulting, the critical thinking and analytical skills she gained in LAS are essential for tackling complex cybersecurity projects.Did you pursue higher education after undergrad?...
2025-05-27 - College of LAS undergraduate student Almoatasim Shahbain was one of more than 200 students nationally to receive the Boren Award. He will use the scholarship to study abroad in Indonesia during part of the 2025-26 academic year. David L. Boren Scholarships and...
2025-05-27 - What does science require? Growing up, Joaquín Rodríguez-López had questions that made all his family members scramble for a book. “Why,” he’d ask, for example, “does the moon stay up there?” Finally when he was about 10 years old his parents got him a chemistry set. You can see what that started—Rodríguez-López is now a professor of chemistry at...
2025-05-27 - On March 11, 1944, my relative 2nd Lt. Thomas V. Kelly, Jr. and 10 other crew members of a B-24 bomber named “Heaven Can Wait” were declared missing in action after being shot down somewhere over the waters of Hansa Bay, Papua New Guinea. For our family, as for so many families of MIAs, all that came back from the war were a few personal effects and a letter of condolence from Tommy’s commander...
2025-05-20 - Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students received places in the Fulbright Commission’s Summer Institutes program — a selective summer scholarship program. Lindsay Bitner-Mitchell, a first-year student who is majoring in...
2025-05-20 - The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presents the Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership each year to distinguished faculty who enrich the intellectual vitality of campus and the broader community. The awards were presented in three...
2025-05-19 - Jennifer Grove (BS, ’15, anthropology) is the collections storage coordinator at Spurlock Museum of World Cultures on campus. Jennifer worked at the museum during her undergraduate studies and has returned as a full time staff member using her degree to oversee day-to-day activity within the artifact...
2025-05-15 - Bonnie Kim’s long road to earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois is coming to an end. Since spring 2024, when she returned to campus after 45 years to wrap up her coursework, she’s felt something like a time traveler, studying as a full-time college student at a university that’s so familiar and yet so dramatically different than it was in the late 1970s. After all, Bonnie left...
2025-05-15 - In chemistry, the right combination of essential elements can lead to scientific discoveries that impact the world. Drawing a comparison, Rosa Milagros Santos, associate provost of faculty development at Illinois, described as “essential elements” the generosity of individuals who support faculty research and the talented faculty members who benefit from their support. “Combining these...
2025-05-12 - Humor is deeper than a means to make us laugh. Luvell Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the U of I, researches the social context behind the things that we find funny—or not—to learn more about how people use comedy to inspire reflection and deal with sensitive subjects. Anderson worked previously as a musician. While studying at Rutgers,...
2025-05-12 - Three English professors were recently honored at the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick and Robert Schaefer investiture ceremony at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center. A crowd of almost 80 people showed up to celebrate the professors’ accomplishments and presence on campus. Janice H. Harrington and Curtis Perry were named Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick...
2025-05-07 - When picturing a “typical” alcoholic, people tend to imagine a person drinking at home alone. But that focus overlooks the social origins of many serious alcohol problems, say the authors of a new review paper in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. “Evidence for the centrality of social motives in problem drinking surround us,” write the authors, Catharine Fairbairn, a...
2025-04-29 - Two faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been newly elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. History professor Antoinette Burton and chemistry professor...
2025-04-29 - Experimental and amateur filmmakers are expanding cinema by using new technologies, such as cell phones and virtual reality, and through increasing globalization of the distribution of their work. Eduardo Ledesma, a Spanish professor, examined how experimental filmmakers in Latin America and Spain use alternative film formats in his new book “...
2025-04-29 - Marynia Kolak is a professor of geography and geographic information science and principal investigator for the Health Regions & Policies Lab. As a health geographer and spatial data scientist, Kolak is committed to understanding how where we live and work shapes our health outcomes—a pursuit that...
2025-04-29 - Scientists developed a machine-learning tool that can teach itself, with minimal external guidance, to differentiate between aerial images of flowering and nonflowering grasses — an advance that will greatly increase the pace of agricultural field research, they say. The work was conducted using images of thousands of varieties of Miscanthus grasses, each of which has its own flowering...
2025-04-24 - Several years ago, a conversation with a young coffee farmer from Panama stirred in José Andino Martinez a deep curiosity about the chemistry of coffee. The farmer impressed upon Andino the significance of the coffee bean growing and roasting process in producing a wide variety of attributes that determine the taste and aroma of coffees, especially those with high quality flavor profile.“...
2025-04-24 - The week of April 7-11, 2025, was recently named Phosphorous Week by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. This occurred in large part due to efforts by the Science and Technologies for Phosphorous Sustainability (STEPS) Center, a collaboration of scientists that works to raise awareness of the environmental impacts of using phosphorous for fertilizing crops....
2025-04-22 - There’s a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in 1861 that the East Central Illinois Alliance of Braver Angels likes to remember as it works to bridge partisan divides: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory...