2018-12-19
- Back in 2011, in an era of outsourcing American jobs overseas, Ankur Gopal (BA, ’97, history) had an idea: Why couldn’t more tech jobs move inland from Silicon Valley and the coasts instead of leaving the country? As it turns out, they could.
From his basement in Louisville, Kentucky, Gopal founded Interapt, an...
2018-12-17 - Six faculty members in the College of LAS have been named to the 2018 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. They are among the 11 professors selected across campus for this year’s list. The list recognizes “leading researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world,” according to Clarivate Analytics....
2018-12-14 - Paul Kenis has been named the Elio Eliakim Tarika Endowed Chair of Chemical Engineering in a ceremony honoring his success and leadership in the field. Kenis, head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in his native country of the Netherlands before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at...
2018-12-12 - Move over, trap-jaw ants and mantis shrimp: There’s a faster appendage in town. According to a new study, the Dracula ant, Mystrium camillae, can snap its mandibles at speeds of up to 90 meters per second (more than 200 mph), making it the fastest animal movement on record. “The high accelerations of Mystrium strikes likely result in high-impact forces necessary for predatory...
2018-12-10 - In the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, 16-year-old students in middle-track schools decide whether to stay in school to pursue an academic career or enroll in a vocational training program. A new study offers evidence that the path they choose influences their personality years later. The research is reported in the journal Psychological Science. “We wanted to understand whether choosing...
2018-12-07 - Thousands of letters written by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) will be available to scholars, Proust fans and the public on a website created by University of Illinois researchers and their partners in France to digitize Proust’s correspondence. The first phase of the Corr-Proust website – Marcel Proust’s World War I letters – was launched in late...
2018-12-04 - When author Nafissa Thompson-Spires was growing up, she read historical fiction about black families in America, but she really wanted stories about contemporary living that she could relate to. “I didn’t have people burning crosses on my lawn or calling me (a racist slur), but I experienced a lot of terrible microaggressions. I wanted to see black people alive and coping with those things,...
2018-12-03 - This fall, Martin Pomper gathered with others from across the world to be officially inducted the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in medicine for professional achievement and commitment to service. Today, Pomper (BS, '82, biochemistry; BS, '82; PhD, '89, chemistry...
2018-11-30 - An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Departments of Chemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Bioengineering have joined forces to develop a highly sensitive neural probe to monitor brain chemistry. The team received $3 million from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) ...
2018-11-30 - Three minutes or less. In the time it takes for your favorite song to play, University of Illinois graduate students recently showcased their remarkable research to a panel of judges at the fourth annual Research Live! competition at Illinois. This year, five graduate students in LAS participated in the competition — Hope Holland...
2018-11-28 - Diwakar Shukla, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and Blue Waters assistant professor, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award will provide five years of support for Shukla’s efforts in developing new algorithms and their applications to the field of computational biology...
2018-11-27 - Two professors from the College of LAS have been elected 2018 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Plant biology professors Andrew Leakey and Ray Ming are among the 416 people to be awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow this year. Two other professors at Illinois, including mechanical science and engineering professor...
2018-11-26 - Beware the jumping cholla, Cylindropuntia fulgida. This shrubby, branching cactus will – if provoked by touching – anchor its splayed spines in the flesh of the offender. The barbed spines grip so tightly that a segment of cactus often breaks off with them, leaving the victim with a prickly problem. This is one of six species of cactus subjected to careful testing by...
2018-11-20 - Fresh out of college, Shakari Stroud landed a position coveted by many new graduates: She joined Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that places promising young teachers in K-12 schools in low-income communities to help improve the learning environment for children. As a middle school math teacher, she laughs, she cries, she deals with lost backpacks—and...
2018-11-15 - Almost 150 students in the College of LAS receive more than $500,000 in scholarship awarded through 51 different college-level scholarship funds for the 2018-19 school year. The recipients and donors were honored recently on campus for an LAS Scholarship Celebration. The second annual event drew more than...
2018-11-15 - Hong Yang, a chemical engineering professor at Illinois since 2012, has been named the Richard C. Alkire Chair in Chemical Engineering in a ceremony honoring his commitment and leadership within the field. Yang is recognized worldwide for his contribution to the fundamental understanding and processing of nanostructured materials such as precisely controlled metal, metal alloy...
2018-11-13 - The gold nanoparticles created by Catherine Murphy, the Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry, range in size from 5 to 100 nanometers. To get an idea how small that is, consider this: Your fingernails grow about 1 nanometer per second. One of those virtually invisible gold nanoparticles might not pack much market value, but...
2018-11-13 - Six assistant professors have been recognized as Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholars for their contributions and potential in teaching and research.The awardees are Mauro Nobili in the Department of History; Aleks Ksiazkiewicz in the Department of Political Science; Xun Yan in the...
2018-11-12 - You may know him from Peanuts as the German flying ace who always got the best of Snoopy. Perhaps you’ve seen him portrayed as an almost supernaturally skilled war pilot in movies and games reenacting the sky battles of World War I. Some 100 years after his bright-red triplane was shot out of the sky in the waning days of the Great War, the Red Baron has become a glorified...
2018-11-07 - Chad Rienstra, a chemistry professor at Illinois since 2002, was named the John Witt Professor of Chemistry in a ceremony lauding his work in research and teaching. Rienstra’s research into producing high-resolution structures of protein structures through nuclear magnetic resonance technology has driven progress in medicine,...
2018-11-07 - As a senior studying sociology and chemistry, Tonisha Thacker is used to people questioning her choice of majors, which on paper can seem like complete opposites.“People are always like, ‘Why?’” she said. But her track record of success speaks for itself—recently, Thacker was named the Research Park’s most...
2018-11-01 - What do Asian American literature, the politics of hip hop, Latina and Latino families, and Mexican –American history have in common? They are just a few subjects among many spring in the College of LAS that will fulfill a new general education requirement at the University of Illinois in Spring 2019. Previously, all undergraduates at Illinois were required to take a Western...
2018-10-31 - University of Illinois entomology professor and department head May Berenbaum, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and longtime editorial contributor to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other journals, has been appointed editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), effective...
2018-10-31 - Cassandra Osei and Billy Keniston, doctoral students in the Department of History at of Illinois, each applied for the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship knowing that the chances they would win the competitive fellowship were extremely slim.After months of waiting, however, they were surprised to learn that they both were...
2018-10-29 - The outcome of the 2016 presidential contest was a big surprise to many, if not most, pollsters and pundits. With a much-anticipated midterm just a week away, what should we expect from polls and what assumptions should we question? Illinois political scientist and polling expert Brian Gaines spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor...