2016-05-12
- When she headed to campus as a freshman, Donna O’Shaughnessy, who is now a graduating senior, didn’t bring a smart phone.Or a laptop computer.Or a debit card.She hadn’t taken an anti-technology pledge. Those technologies simply didn’t exist when her parents dropped her off at school the summer after she graduated from Joliet East High School in 1976.She was the first in her family to attend...
2016-05-11 - Teachers and advisers in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been recognized in the college and across campus for excellence in guiding students through their studies at Illinois.Each year, LAS shines a light on a handful of its outstanding faculty and staff with annual teaching and advising awards. Professors, teaching assistants, specialized faculty, and advisers were chosen for six...
2016-05-09 - Melissa Luebbe was an active student while she studied speech communication at Illinois, but one of the best things she did for her career was asking a single question: Can you give me an internship? Read how that led to the launch of a successful career promoting tourism. Occupation: National...
2016-05-05 - The reopening of a renovated Lincoln Hall in 2012 represented a fresh start not only for the building and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, but for eight incoming freshmen who enrolled that fall as the first scholarship recipients of the Lincoln Scholars Initiative. The initiative, a scholarship program for promising...
2016-05-04 - Several individual and group outreach efforts in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been recognized by the University of Illinois for advancing solutions to matters of public importance. Recipients in the college and elsewhere on campus received the 2016 Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagements, presented by Interim Chancellor Barbara J. Wilson, also...
2016-05-03 - Two professors at the University of Illinois have received grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E.) designated for promising young scientists.Alison Fout, professor of chemistry, and Jessica Krogstad, professor of materials science and engineering, received 2016 Early Career Research Program grants through the D.O.E. The grants provide at...
2016-04-29 - As the universe expands, perhaps it’s only natural that the Astronomy Open House does, too. For the first time organizers made the open house a full-day event, and it was a success: the Department of Astronomy estimated that some 500 people attended. “The open house was our first ever of its kind, and exceeded our expectations in...
2016-04-27 - Nearly 110 College of Liberal Arts & Sciences students’ names are being inscribed on the university’s Bronze Tablet for the 2015-16 school year.The Bronze Tablet, which is placed in the University of Illinois Library each year, lists those students who have achieved University Honors.These students are selected based on their outstanding academic performances during their undergraduate...
2016-04-26 - A public history project at the University of Illinois is exploring the hidden and forgotten stories of social movements on campus and in the community. Students are creating a map highlighting buildings or areas that were the sites of protest movements, and they are writing narratives about the significance of those places.“We’re thinking about how we can collectively understand and interpret...
2016-04-25 - You may not win friends, but a new study from the University of Illinois finds that you can influence people simply by lowering the pitch of your voice in the first moments of a conversation.The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that people whose voices went down in pitch early on in an interaction were more likely to be seen as dominant and influential...
2016-04-22 - Juan Felipe Herrera, the U.S. poet laureate and the first Latino to receive the country’s highest honor in poetry, will speak at the University of Illinois on April 28.He’ll give a reading and book signing at 7:30 p.m. April 28 in the ballroom at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center, 601 S. Lincoln Ave., Urbana. The event is free and open to the public. Herrera’s visit is hosted by the...
2016-04-21 - The Department of English has launched the University of Illinois’ first lecture-based, massive open online course (MOOC) in American poetry.The course, Modern American Poetry, is ideal for faculty, students, high school teachers and individuals around the world who have an interest in the topic. Almost 600 participants from 40 different countries...
2016-04-19 - Thanks to a major campus undertaking, the University of Illinois and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences know a little more about one of its most important groups of people—its new graduates. The university today released results of its Illini Success initiative, which surveys new bachelor’s degree recipients on their post-graduation plans.Career data has important implications, from...
2016-04-19 - Sophomore Jordan Meadows went to State Farm Center for the first time back in January, during an Illinois men’s basketball game. Unlike the thousands of fans decked out in orange and blue, Meadows was dressed in a suit jacket and more nervous about tripping on his shoelaces than how the Illini fared against Ohio State.During the game’s first media timeout, Meadows, who majors in integrative...
2016-04-16 - Six professors at the University of Illinois, including five in the College of LAS, have been named 2016 Guggenheim Fellows, bringing to 13 the number of U. of I. faculty members who have been honored with the fellowship over the last three years. This year’s fellows are Dennis Baron, Karin A. Dahmen, Craig Koslofsky, Mei-Po Kwan, Ralph W. Mathisen, and Rebecca Stumpf. They...
2016-04-16 - A pair of LAS alumni responsible for momentous breakthroughs in science will be formally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in a ceremony next week. The late William Sparks (PhD, chemistry,’36) AND the late Welton Taylor (BA, ’41, MS, ’47, and PhD, ’48, bacteriology) were among 16 inductees recently admitted to the...
2016-04-14 - Researchers have uncovered the existence of a dwarf “dark galaxy” lurking nearly 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery was made when a team of researchers, including astronomers at the University of Illinois, using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), noticed subtle distortions in the image of gravitational lens SDP.81. The...
2016-04-13 - Two students in the College of LAS have been selected from a nationwide field of future mathematicians, scientists, and engineers to receive Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years. A third received honorable mention.Sophomores Elijah Karvelis and Boris Xu were among 252 Goldwater Scholars selected from a field of 1,150 nominees on the basis of academic merit....
2016-04-08 - Plant biologists at the University of Illinois have pinpointed the area of genomes within nitrogen-fixing bacteria in roots, called rhizobia, that’s being altered when the plant they serve is exposed to nitrogen fertilizer.The study, published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, deepens the understanding of an Illinois study last year that indicated rhizobia—which are...
2016-04-04 - Werner Baer, a talented and passionate professor of economics who joined the University of Illinois 42 years ago, passed away suddenly on Thursday following a brief illness, the Department of Economics announced. Baer, born in 1931, was internationally renowned for his research on South America and specialized in Brazilian...
2016-04-01 - Black gay men were largely missing in both black and gay history, so Kevin Mumford, who specializes in both, set out to tell their story. “I wanted to reclaim a history that had been washed over, that had been overlooked,” said Mumford, a University of Illinois history professor. He wanted to show how “black gay lives matter.” The...
2016-03-30 - The University of Illinois has joined with the online education company Coursera to offer a professional data science master’s degree beginning this fall. The Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS) degree promises to open a quickly growing field to potential data scientists who are unable to take a traditional education path.The Department of ...
2016-03-30 - Chemists have identified the complex chemical structure of the protein that stacks together to form fibrils in the brains of Parkinson’s disease patients. Armed with this knowledge, researchers can identify specific targets for diagnosis and treatment. University of Illinois chemists, collaborating with peers at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University and Queen...
2016-03-23 - A healthy brain is critical to a person’s cognitive abilities, but measuring brain health can be a complicated endeavor. A new study by University of Illinois researchers reports that healthy brain metabolism corresponds with fluid intelligence—a measure of one’s ability to solve unusual or complex problems—in young adults. What’s more, researchers concluded that fluid...
2016-03-21 - Aspiring novelists had the chance to pitch their book ideas in front of an esteemed panel of writers during Illinois’ inaugural Pitchapalooza event in Lincoln Hall.Created by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, co-founders of The Book Doctors, Pitchapalooza is a traveling nationwide event that challenges potential authors to wow judges and a live audience with their book pitches in one minute...