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...
2018-09-18 - 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 - 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...
2018-09-14 - 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. “...
2018-09-13 - 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...