2018-10-25
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From one point of view, owning a trailer and renting a site in a mobile home park has the potential to be a place of opportunity and upward social mobility for low income families seeking to someday own a conventional home. A book by an LAS alumna and retired Illinois professor, however, shows how current economic conditions in trailer park communities may severely restrict...
2018-10-24 - David Franklin has been interested in film for as long as he can remember. Franklin recalls spending most of his time at college watching films for class and writing movie reviews on his own time for The Daily Illini.After graduating from Illinois, Franklin (BA, ’92, humanities) went on to film school at the University of Texas-Austin, and eventually became an editor and producer, most notably...
2018-10-23 - Atmospheric scientists at Illinois are headed to Argentina this November to lead an international team of researchers in a $30 million field campaign to research the most intense thunderstorms in the world. As springtime rolls into Pampas, a vast plains region spreading from the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Argentina to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil, the 50 million...
2018-10-22 - Six professors from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been named Conrad Humanities Scholars. They are taking advantage of the new designation to pursue a variety of projects, from studying second language acquisition and black girlhood to researching immigration politics. The Conrad Humanities Scholar awards are funded by a gift from the late Arlys Conrad, whose...
2018-10-18 - A chemistry professor and a mathematics alumnus from the University of Illinois have received highly touted Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering for 2018. Renske van der Veen, a professor of chemistry who is also affiliated with the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory and...
2018-10-15 - Entomology professor Gene Robinson, an international leader in honey bee research, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine “for pioneering contributions to understanding the roles of genes in social behavior.” Robinson directs the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....
2018-10-15 - Genna Roth, a high school sophomore, dreams of following the career path of her favorite director, Wes Anderson, and weaving together math and art to create films. Two thousand miles away from the sound stages and shooting scripts in Hollywood, however, she knows the odds are against her. Only eight percent of directors are women, and she feels that even...
2018-10-12 - Organizers of the ACES + LAS Career Fair at Illinois, held earlier this month, wanted to try something new: An LAS career fair devoted to connecting students in the liberal arts and sciences with potential employers. The result? It brought together more LAS students and companies than any other campus career fair in recent years. Brian Neighbors, director of career development in LAS Student...
2018-10-10 - What was Brad Evans, aka “The Big Noise” on Yahoo! Sports, doing prior to becoming a must-read analyst for fantasy football and college basketball fans? He was a history teacher in Champaign, Illinois. Read on to learn how majoring in history and teaching students about the Battle of Tippecanoe helped...
2018-10-08 - Joanne Chory’s approach to plant genetics has been described as “letting the mutants lead.” Chory (MS, ’80; PhD ’84; microbiology) is considered one of the country’s leading plant geneticists, and it was her use of mutant species, grown in total darkness, that led to her first breakthrough discovery in 1989,...
2018-10-08 - The stunning images of cells under the microscope were what first drew Anne Carpenter (PhD, ’03, cellular and structural biology) to the laboratory of LAS professor Andrew Belmont in 1997. But Carpenter said she also joined Belmont’s laboratory as a graduate student because “he thinks very clearly and deeply about things,”...
2018-10-08 - It was Valentine’s Day, 2005, and for the first time since she could remember, Sarah was safe. Sarah had taken her two young boys and fled an abusive relationship, becoming one of the first people to find shelter in a new WINGS safe house in the Chicago suburb of Rolling Meadows. “Sarah told me that Valentine’s Day, on the day you expect love the most, was the day when she got...
2018-10-08 - John Witt credits his passion for the University of Illinois to both the Big Four and the Big Ten. In 1957, Witt (PhD, ’61, chemistry) was trying to decide where to pursue his PhD studies, and his academic adviser recommended three options. He could study on the East Coast, West Coast, or Midwest, and Witt ultimately chose the heart...
2018-10-08 - Richard Clarida was strolling across the University of Illinois campus in the winter of 1979, his senior year, when he suddenly heard a song he wrote, wafting through the open window of an apartment building. He was also thrilled to hear his song being played at a keg party, programmed between the Beatles’ “White Album” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” Clarida (BS, ’79...
2018-10-08 - Marie Trzupek Lynch was a graduate student living on the north side of Chicago when a neighbor changed her life. The neighbor, who lived in the same apartment building, told Lynch (BA, ’94, history) that her friend had just turned down an internship in the Chicago Mayor’s Office. That opened the door for Lynch’s big break because she...
2018-10-08 - Like so many people in the United States, one of this year’s LAS alumni award winners saw her life permanently changed on September 11, 2001, when planes struck the World Trade Center. That’s when she decided to return to the National Security Agency.For another award winner, her defining moment was when she decided to program a microscope in the lab of her LAS professor. And for another, the...
2018-10-08 - Mary Lynn Reed will never forget the morning she woke up in San Diego to a phone call from her mother back in Florida. The day was September 11, 2001. “My mom told me to turn the TV on,” said Reed (MS, ’90; PhD, ’95; mathematics). “At that point, the first plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was a surreal memory as I drove to work...
2018-10-04 - Rebecca Sandefur, a professor of sociology and of law at the University of Illinois, has been awarded a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant,” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The fellowship carries an unrestricted $625,000 stipend to be used as the fellow sees best. Sandefur said her plan is to use the...
2018-10-03 - Avital Livny has always been interested in explaining the role of religious and ethnic identity in the politics of different nations. But when the professor of political science started looking at existing estimates of ethnic diversity around the world, something wasn’t adding up. Livny noticed that those existing datasets used estimates...
2018-10-02 - To be Hopi is to run. “That’s who we are and that’s what we do,” said Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert. So it’s no surprise that Gilbert, a professor and the director of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois, was drawn to the story of runners from his tribal community in northern Arizona, in the early 1900s, often...
2018-09-28 - Do liver cells divide? Results indicate that approximately 4 percent of liver cells are synthesizing DNA in preparation for cell division at any given time. These cells alternate with waves of other cells, and it is estimated that around 10 percent of the liver cell population is involved in cell duplication. In Greek mythology, Zeus punishes the trickster Prometheus by chaining...
2018-09-26 - A chemistry professor has been named to Science News magazine’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch list, a prestigious distinction spotlighting early- and mid-career scientists for tackling major challenges facing science and society. Joaquín Rodríguez-López, 35, was selected for his efforts to expand affordable, renewable energy by designing materials to...
2018-09-25 - Two College of LAS professors at the Urbana-Champaign campus have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Alison M. Bell, a professor of animal biology, and Luisa-Elena Delgado, a professor of...
2018-09-24 - Cupcake day was frantically approaching at Taylor Mazique’s high school. It was supposed to be a happy day, devoted to eating cupcakes and celebrating the various universities that seniors had decided to attend. But it was causing her stress: Mazique had no clue what colors or university logo she would wear on that special day. “I was trying to pick what college I was going to go to,” recalls...
2018-09-19 - Movie fans and scholars alike will soon be able to visualize an entangled network of Indian film stars, the history of Indian cinema, and the trajectory of Bollywood as it shot towards mainstream fame with an interface professor Rini Mehta is developing through a fellowship with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mehta, professor of...