2018-09-18
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If you made a list of some of the worst things that could happen, wars and sick babies would be near the top. But these were the ingredients for the career of Daniel Bruzzini, whose military service as a physician included preparing doctors, nurses, and medics in the U.S. military to care for children in war zones. Now he’s in private practice, but his mission to help the...
2018-09-14 - One of the new faculty faces on campus this fall is David Sepkoski, who has spent his career blending the fields of science and history. His father, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, was his first introduction to the field, and Sepkoski decided to venture further. “...
2018-09-14 - The National Academy of Engineering (NAE)’s 2019 nominating committee has recommended Illinois and LAS alumnus John L. Anderson to stand as the sole candidate for the NAE presidency. Academy members will vote in March 2019 to elect a new NAE president to a six-year term beginning July 1.Anderson (MS, '69; PhD, '71; chemical...
2018-09-13 - A geologist, a microscopist and a doctor walk into a lab and, with their colleagues from across the nation, make a discovery that overturns centuries of thought about the nature and composition of kidney stones. The team’s key insight, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, is that kidney stones are built up in calcium-rich layers that resemble other mineralizations in nature, such as those...
2018-09-13 - Charee Thompson’s research can delve into some sensitive topics. For example, the assistant professor of communication recently studied how people doubted a family member’s illness, particularly in cases of illnesses that are hard to trace and understand such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. “I’ve always been interested in how people...
2018-09-11 - Just two days before Marianne Kalinke was supposed to attend the International Saga Conference in Iceland, the professor emerita received a phone call from Guðrún Nordal, director of the Árni Magnússon Institute — the manuscript institute at the University of Iceland.Nordal was calling to tell Kalinke that President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson of Iceland was going to award Kalinke Iceland’s...
2018-09-05 - That winky-face emoji that you use at the end of a text isn’t just a fun picture added to your sentence. It can convey linguistic meaning that changes the interpretation of the sentence, a new study finds. University of Illinois researchers studied the brain wave patterns of people reading sentences paired with emojis. Sometimes the emojis matched the literal meaning of the...
2018-09-01 - “What think you of books?” Mr. Darcy asks Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s immortal novel, “Pride and Prejudice.”“Books—Oh! no.—I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings,” answers Elizabeth.Today, more than 200 years since “Pride and Prejudice” was published, the digital revolution has transformed books in ways that would astound Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, not to mention Jane...
2018-09-01 - For most of history, the 70 percent of our planet’s surface that hides below the ocean surface have been a mystery, too deep for humans to observe and understand. A century ago scientists knew more about the surface of the Moon than the bottom of the ocean. Modern science has since allowed us to explore the ocean’s depths, however, and beside the discoveries themselves, one of...
2018-08-31 - College of LAS alumna Candace Penn Frame (BS, ’72, geography) always assumed she would go into teaching. The central Illinois native even went on to get her teaching certificate from Illinois State University following her bachelor’s degree. But her love of geography never softened. “Geographic information science is changing the...
2018-08-30 - Plans for a new statewide innovation network to accelerate job creation and economic growth include building a world-class center devoted to the fast-growing field of data science, U of I System officials announced yesterday. The data science center will be created by razing and replacing the university’s Illini Hall, which currently consists of primarily classrooms, computer...
2018-08-29 - Seventeen faculty members have taken new leadership positions in departments and other academic units across the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences this fall semester. Leadership changes among the more than 60 academic units that make up the college are a normal and healthy process, said Feng Sheng Hu, the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of LAS. “...
2018-08-27 - A new financial-aid program aims to make attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign more affordable for qualifying families in the state of Illinois.Illinois Commitment will provide financial awards to cover the tuition and campus fees for in-state students whose family income is less than $61,000, the current median family...
2018-08-22 - Natural selection—that merciless weeder-outer of biological designs that are out of step with the times—also is a wily shaper of traits. Exhibit A is the pointy murre egg, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Common murres and thick-billed murres tend to nest in tightly packed colonies on craggy seaside cliffs. The ledges on...
2018-08-20 - During her undergraduate days at Illinois, Meirav Malter had a common problem faced by curious people: She wanted to study pretty much everything. That’s how she wound up double majoring in global studies and Jewish studies with a minor in history—including courses on Hebrew, Arabic, Judaism, and Middle Eastern statehood, not to mention her research on Bedouin tribes of the...
2018-08-17 - It was an event that seemed to encapsulate the tumult of the 1960s. Police clashed violently with anti-war protesters in Chicago’s streets. Party factions waged political battle within the hall. What was happening in the 1968 Democratic Convention 50 years ago, and why? History professor Marsha Barrett specializes in modern U.S....
2018-08-13 - Latinos are still a rarity on American television, especially in proportion to their population. That makes the study of Latino characters and how they’re represented even more important, said Isabel Molina-Guzmán, a professor of media and cinema studies and of Latina/Latino studies. She focuses on the funny ones in her new book “...
2018-08-10 - The effects of global climate change taking place in the Arctic may influence weather much closer to home for millions of Americans, researchers report.The United States has experienced many changes in severe-weather behavior over the past decade, including fewer tornado touchdowns than in the past. A new study suggests that atmospheric circulation changes that coincide with a loss of Arctic sea...
2018-08-09 - Scholars from across the world came to Illinois for the Human-Animal Studies Summer Institute to delve deeper into the implications and discoveries from their studies of human-animal relations. This is the second year the university hosted the week-long institute, which is a partnership between the University of Illinois' Center for Advanced Study and the...
2018-08-08 - On a typical day, you can find Sampson hard at work alongside researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Instead of taking samples and calculating results, however, Sampson is ever watchful of Joey Ramp, a senior molecular and cellular biology major, as she goes about her tasks. Sampson, a 3-year-old golden retriever, is Ramp’s service...
2018-08-07 - Each day as she enters her office, the lessons that Pamela Greer learned from Robert Copeland come to mind as she sits in his old chair and waters the plant he left behind when he retired in 2001. In 1989, Copeland took a chance on Greer (BA, '89, speech communication) when she applied for a job in LAS right after earning her bachelor’s degree. Now, almost 30 years later, Greer...
2018-08-06 - After a primary tumor is treated, cancer stem cells may still lurk in the body, ready to metastasize and cause a recurrence of the cancer in a form that’s more aggressive and resistant to treatment. University of Illinois researchers have developed a molecular probe that seeks out these elusive cells and lights them up so they can be identified, tracked and studied not only in...
2018-08-03 - As a rising businesswoman in the 1970s and 1980s, Evelyn Ebbert (BS, ’63, science and letters) advocated tirelessly for other women as they worked their way up the ranks in the corporate world. Now, her nephew, John Ebbert, has set up a scholarship through the College of LAS to honor his late aunt, who passed away earlier this year, to help junior or senior students with an...
2018-08-02 - Seismic waves are helping researchers uncover the mysterious subsurface history of the Tibetan Plateau, possibly lending insight to future earthquake activity in the region. The specifics of the deep geologic processes that occurred roughly 50 million years ago, when the Indian and Asian tectonics plates collided, have remained elusive. By collecting high-resolution earthquake...
2018-08-01 - A College of LAS alumnus has been selected to direct the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). If his appointment is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he will serve as President Donald Trump’s top science adviser. The selection of Kelvin Droegemeier (MS, ’82; PhD, ’85; atmospheric science), which was announced late Monday, has been...