2019-04-08
- University of Illinois history professor Marsha Barrett is the recipient of a 2019 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
A specialist in modern U.S. political and African American history, Barrett is one of only 81 fellows chosen from more than 1,100 applicants, according to an ACLS...
2019-04-04 - Ralph Stoner Wolfe, a professor emeritus of microbiology at the University of Illinois who contributed to the discovery of a third superkingdom of life, died Tuesday, March 26, at Meadowbrook Health Center in Urbana. He was 97. Wolfe joined the U of I faculty in 1953. Many of his scientific contributions stemmed from his study of...
2019-04-03 - Ironically, the same year that George Akst was offered a coveted tenure-track professor position, he decided that he was meant to pursue a new calling that resonated more deeply with him. Akst left academia and began a career in military operations research. Today, Akst (MS, ’72; PhD, ’74; mathematics) serves as the director of the Operations Analysis...
2019-04-01 - Real-time monitoring of indoor air quality, creating scholarly gaming environments, and developing sustainable solutions for cities are among the projects funded in the...
2019-04-01 - How do you expose students to real world problems and solutions? You can bring the real world to them, which is what happened at the recent Datathon held at the U of I campus. About 250 students came together at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center for a competition coordinated by the Illini Statistics Club, the...
2019-03-27 - Military couples look forward to joyful celebrations and reunions after long deployments. Difficulties may lie ahead, though, and new research with more than 500 couples in the months after homecoming suggests how and when to help. “Military couples are incredibly resilient,” says University of Illinois communication professor Leanne Knobloch,...
2019-03-19 - When will workplaces across the United States have an equal split between men and women in their ranks? Twenty years? Maybe 40? According to a mathematical model created by a research assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, the answer to that question in some professions could be never—unless interventions occur. While women consist of 50...
2019-03-14 - The eruptions of the Mount Vesuvius volcano in the 1760s and 1770s set off a public fascination with volcanoes. Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples at the time, studied the volcano extensively and wrote one of the most celebrated and beautiful books on Mount Vesuvius. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois has acquired an edition of Hamilton’s book...
2019-03-13 - William Guenthner is in search of missing time—1.2 billion lost years, to be more precise. Geologists call it the Great Unconformity. Originally observed by John Wesley Powell in the Grand Canyon in 1869, the phenomenon describes two layers of rock that stretch across most of North America and come together despite an age difference of about 12 million centuries. So what happened to the missing...
2019-03-12 - Results from a new study suggest that bees might be exposed to pesticides in more ways than we thought, and it could impact their development significantly. The study, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, looks at the non-target effects of pesticides on ground-nesting bees, a group that actually makes up the majority of bee species. Non-target effects refer to the effects on organisms other...
2019-03-12 - There’s now a national park in Indiana at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, less than 50 miles from Chicago. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore just got an upgrade. Illinois political science professor Robert Pahre studies and teaches the politics around national parks, often using Indiana Dunes as a classroom. He spoke with News Bureau...
2019-03-08 - New graduates from the College of LAS continue to be successful at securing a first destination soon after graduation, according to an analysis of alumni at Illinois. Those who have landed jobs are also drawing larger salaries for their work. According to the Illini Success initiative, a campuswide effort to gather career-related...
2019-03-08 - This year, Katie Frye, a teaching assistant for MCB 150, enjoys engaging, active learning classrooms and other advanced facilities for her students. That’s because Frye, a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology, conducts her office hours and teaches in the new learning center located in Burrill Hall. The...
2019-03-05 - Some 27,000 years ago in central Belize, a giant sloth was thirsty. The region was arid, not like today’s steamy jungle. The Last Glacial Maximum had locked up much of Earth’s moisture in polar ice caps and glaciers. Water tables in the area were low. The sloth, a beast that stood up to 4 meters tall, eventually found water – in a deep sinkhole with steep walls down to the water. That is where...
2019-03-01 - Thirteen individuals from units across the College of LAS are receiving teaching and advising awards for excellence in educating and mentoring students at Illinois. They will be honored at a ceremony in April. Professors Brian Allan, Manisha Basu, William Brieher, Philipp Hieronymi, and Sandra Ruiz have been selected by an awards committee to receive the LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in...
2019-03-01 - Almost 50 years after her death, Maudelle Tanner Brown Bousfield, the first African-American female student at Illinois, is known as a pioneer. During her lifetime, she learned that the title did not come easily. In 1926, Bousfield (AB, ’06, mathematics and astronomy) was working at Wendell Phillips High School...
2019-03-01 - Sometimes an unusual comparison can bring big problems to light. Back in the late 1990s, when Rebecca Sandefur was working on her doctoral degree at the University of Chicago, she was troubled by a discrepancy she saw between the U.S. legal system and public schools. Both were large and publicly funded institutions, but while schools were easily accessible, the court system was so complex that...
2019-03-01 - In 1995, Eduardo Ledesma graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and became a bridge engineer. For 10 years, he got up every morning, went to work and did what he had trained to do. And then, something changed. “I had always been fascinated by the humanities,” said Ledesma. So, just for fun, he started taking night courses in...
2019-02-27 - In many societies, teenagers are repeatedly told – by adults, peers and popular media – that teens are more likely than younger children to take risks, ignore their parents, skip schoolwork and succumb to bad influences. But stereotypes are not destiny, a new study of Chinese middle school students suggests. In the study, reported in the journal Child Development, researchers talked with...
2019-02-26 - A scientist in the College of LAS is among 126 recipients of the 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. According to the foundation, the awards “honor early career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the most promising researchers in their fields.” This year’s LAS recipient is chemical and biomolecular engineering...
2019-02-22 - What do you get when you add mathematics and chalkboards? Grant Cole, a building service worker from Facilities & Services who worked in Altgeld Hall, can answer that question: Dust, and lots of it. As a cleaner in one of the busiest buildings on campus—a mathematics building to boot—Cole knew how the learning process could be accompanied by clouds of dust as dense as the morning fog. The...
2019-02-21 - Termites are vilified as destroyers of all things wooden, but they are also misunderstood. “The one thing that everyone knows about these insects and seems to care about is they cause billions of dollars of damage by eating wood,” said May Berenbaum, a professor and head of the entomology department at the University of Illinois. “In reality...
2019-02-19 - E-cigarettes get teenagers hooked on nicotine. Or they aid cigarette smokers seeking to quit. Or they may be harmful in other ways. Those competing messages make the devices a tricky subject for health communicators, says Cabral Bigman, a professor of communication at Illinois whose research focuses on health communication issues around vaping....
2019-02-15 - Philippe Tondeur, professor emeritus of mathematics, has worked and studied at universities around the world, but the University of Illinois holds a special place in his heart and mind. Tondeur has donated in support of the Campaign for Altgeld and Illini Halls, which includes a plan to renovate Altgeld...
2019-02-13 - Six staff and academic professionals are being recognized for their particularly noteworthy efforts in advancing the mission of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences in 2018-19. Jenny Cox, Brad Petersen, and Jack Thomas have been selected by an awards committee to receive the LAS Academic Professional Award. The recognition comes with a $1,000 award, a $1,000 salary increment, and a...