LAS News Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

2016-09-20 -     Editor’s note: U of I anthropology professor Kathryn Clancy spoke recently on the subject of sexual harassment and assault in higher education at a conference sponsored several prominent scientific societies. This week,...

2016-09-15 - Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi has written plenty about the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, including two scholarly books. But the University of Illinois professor also lived that history as an activist and then political prisoner, and now has his own evocative story to tell.In a new autobiographic...