2016-11-01
- One student spent the summer tracking prairie chickens near Salem, Illinois, returning to the lab to help analyze their DNA. Another co-wrote a study of the marsupial intervertebral disc, research he and his colleagues hope will offer new insights into human health. Another is designing his own experiments on the evolution of fish behavior. Two others are working on research related to mosquitoes...
2016-10-29 - Martin Camargo, a professor of English and the associate dean for humanities and interdisciplinary programs at the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, has been designated interim dean of LAS while the university conducts an internal search for a new dean to lead the college. Camargo has been appointed in “designate” status...
2016-10-27 - Benjamin L. Hankin, a professor of psychology at Illinois, has been named the Fred and Ruby Kanfer Professor of Psychology. It is the first ever endowed named position in the Department of Psychology. An investiture is one of the highest honors that a faculty member can receive. The position is named for the late Frederick...
2016-10-26 - Artist Horace Pippin was well-known in the 1930s and 1940s for his paintings of African-American life and for his commentary on war. But his work also was described by some as crude and unsophisticated.Poet Janie Harrington found inspiration for her latest book of poetry in the life and art of Pippin. Her book “Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin” is both a critique of the...
2016-10-24 - Doris Derby remembers the exact moment her life changed. It was May 1963, just three months before the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. She was watching the television news and saw violence against protestors who were trying to integrate businesses down South. “The police had German Shepherd dogs and billy clubs, and they were...
2016-10-24 - Elizabeth Pieroth is the first to point out that she is not gifted athletically. Growing up, her family nicknamed her “Grace” because of her lack of that quality in sports. But when it comes to protecting an athlete’s most important body part—the head—Pieroth is the go-to person for many athletic programs around the country, including major professional teams. Today, Pieroth (...
2016-10-24 - A mysterious ailment struck Deborah Paul’s younger brother, Tim, in 1982, when lymph glands all over his body suddenly became swollen. He recovered, but it took two years for doctors to finally figure out what had triggered the problem. In 1984, Paul’s brother developed pneumocystis pneumonia—a type of pneumonia that was beginning to afflict many men in different parts of the...
2016-10-24 - Sharon Mosher’s mother always kidded her that she was born with a rock in her hand. “I essentially wanted to be a geologist my whole life,” Mosher (BS, ‘73, PhD, ‘78, geology ) said. Mosher’s father would take her as a child on Illinois State Geological Survey field trips, and whenever her family went on their annual...
2016-10-24 - Some of this year’s College of LAS alumni award winners knew from an early age what they wanted to do in life. One of them was mixing chemicals—sometimes explosively—in his home chemistry lab as a child. But not all of them saw that far ahead. A pioneer in the treatment of concussions called her studies at the University of Illinois part of her long and winding road to sports...
2016-10-24 - Laura Niklason first came up with the idea of growing human blood vessels while she was doing her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1990s. A patient was undergoing a heart bypass—a surgery in which a physician takes a blood vessel from another part of the patient’s body and then sews it on top of a clogged vessel, forming a bypass around the blockage. The...
2016-10-24 - The room was packed with a standing-room-only crowd. The year was 1963, and the setting was Woods Hole, Massachusetts, renowned for its summer classes in biology. James Spudich (BS, ‘63, chemistry) had just finished his bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois, and he stood at the front of the room, wiping the blackboard...
2016-10-21 - Rivers are notoriously hard to study over long time periods. An international research team, however, has used new techniques, data, and methodology to reveal the threat posed by changing storm patterns to river deltas around the world. Jim Best, the Jack and Richard Threet Professor of Sedimentary Geology at Illinois, along with researchers from the universities of Southampton...
2016-10-19 - An atmospheric sciences professor at Illinois has been named a 2017 Fellow of the American Meteorological Society for significant contributions to the field.Greg McFarquhar was nominated and selected for his “outstanding contributions to the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences or their applications during a substantial period of...
2016-10-18 - Republicans and Democrats “simply do not like each other to an unprecedented degree.” That was one striking conclusion of Illinois political science professor Thomas Rudolph and co-author Marc Hetherington in their 2015 book “Why Washington Won’t Work.” Animosity like that on display in the current campaign has grown dramatically...
2016-10-17 - When the Middle Ages come to mind, many people think of famine, disease and death. But Carol Symes knows there is much more to the medieval past than its often unpleasant popular portrayals and hopes to translate deeper layers of this era for a wider audience—literally.Symes, a professor of history and ...
2016-10-11 - As careers in chemistry go, few have more name recognition than that of Khushboo Narechania, a forensic scientist for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Read on for a real portrayal of the job, from the “CSI effect” to how her analysis solved a tragedy, and how she still refers to her organic chemistry textbooks. Job title: Forensic...
2016-10-07 - A history professor at the University of Illinois has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to set the record straight about the previously fictionalized world of a 17th century traveler. Craig Koslofsky, together with researcher Robert Zaugg of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, received a grant of...
2016-10-06 - Three researchers at U of I have received an award from the National Institutes of Health to fund their highly creative study of cell membrane lipids that promises to advance drugs and medicine against a range of issues. James Morrissey, professor of biochemistry and the Roy and Eva Hong Professor of...
2016-10-04 - Following years of groundbreaking and important research, Milan K. Bagchi, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at Illinois, has been named the Deborah Paul Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology. An investiture is one of the highest honors that faculty member can receive, with the recipient chosen by a...
2016-10-03 - A systematic review of the scientific studies cited by brain-training companies has found no evidence to support their claims that their products improve cognition in daily life. The new study, led by researchers at the U of I, reports that while people tend to improve on the specific tasks they practice, it’s premature to conclude that computerized brain-training programs...
2016-09-29 - The Department of Plant Biology and the School of Integrative Biology will receive an estimated $1.2 million from the U.S. Department of Education over the next three years to assist excellent graduate students who demonstrate financial need and plan to pursue the highest degree available in their course...
2016-09-28 - A new study of older adults finds an association between higher blood levels of phosphatidylcholine, a source of the dietary nutrient choline, and the ability to regulate attention to manage competing tasks. The study at Illinois also identified a brain structure within the prefrontal cortex, a region at the front of the brain, that appears to play a role in this association....
2016-09-27 - A new minor in the LAS Global Studies program will help students prepare for jobs in the business world where knowledge of the interactions between markets and society is increasingly in demand. Applications are being accepted until Oct. 15 for the...
2016-09-26 - Six Urbana campus faculty members, including four in the College of LAS, have been named University Scholars. The program recognizes excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.Begun in 1985, the scholars program recognizes faculty excellence on the three University of Illinois campuses and provides $15,000 to each scholar for each of three years to enhance his or her academic career. The...
2016-09-23 - Researchers at the University of Illinois have been recognized for their proposal of a novel method for identifying partisan gerrymandering: supercomputers. Wendy K. Tam Cho, a professor of political science, and Yan Y. Liu, a senior research programmer in the Department of Geography and...