2016-01-06
- The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities has been awarded a $4.2 million grant renewal from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to foster collaborative research and advance other programs through its Humanities Without Walls initiative.Humanities Without Walls is a 15-member consortium of universities that aims to foster collaborative research,...
2015-12-30 - Six researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.They are among 347 new fellows honored this year by AAAS for their “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.” Fellows are AAAS members selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to the...
2015-12-18 - It’s been another exciting and productive year for LAS alumni, and each year the LAS Alumni Association and the dean of the College of LAS select past graduates to receive LAS Alumni Achievement awards, the LAS Outstanding Young Alumni Award, the LAS Humanitarian Award, and the LAS Quadrangle Award. The following alumni were this year’s recipients. Check back soon for longer and more detailed...
2015-12-04 - Drought takes a deep toll on crops—and there are places so dry that farmers won’t even try to plant there. A multi-million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, however, will help researchers at the University of Illinois reduce the effects of dry spells and potentially turn millions of acres of arid earth into farmland.The University of Illinois has been awarded a $5 million grant...
2015-12-01 - A teenage girl named Kacey survived the horrific shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, when 12 students and one teacher were massacred. However, a single shotgun blast had badly damaged her right hand, arm, and shoulder. In cases such as hers, most victims lose their arm to amputation, but because of donated human tissue that came from AlloSource in Centennial, Colo., this...
2015-12-01 - Christina Brodbeck never could have predicted she would wind up working with computers, let alone be one of the earliest team members of a small startup company called YouTube. “I wouldn’t have imagined it, if I had to bet my life on it,” says Brodbeck, who was also the design leader for YouTube Mobile. After all, she had graduated from the University of Illinois with a...
2015-12-01 - There’s good reason Greek antiquities have lasted thousands of years: They’re pretty interesting, as evidenced by the turnout earlier this month when the LAS Alumni Association organized a gathering at the Field Museum to view 500 of the priceless objects. Some 200 LAS alumni and friends of the college attended the event for a journey through 5,000 years of Greek history and...
2015-12-01 - Darsh Wasan was only eight years old when his family escaped possible death and reached the refugee camps of Bombay, India. A Muslim friend warned his parents that they should escape on the next train because, as a Hindu minority in their village, they were targeted to be killed. This was in 1947, when India was being divided into three parts—West and East Pakistan, which were...
2015-12-01 - Financial gifts and renewed commitments of $420,000 will allow the Program in Modern Greek Studies at Illinois to offer more culture courses, develop a new academic minor and online courses, and increase international visibility and impact to improve cross-cultural understanding between the U.S. and Greece.The additional support comes at an...
2015-12-01 - Guy Padbury’s work for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company hit closer to home than he ever expected when his father was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Padbury’s team with Upjohn did the metabolism research on a molecule that was licensed to Eli Lily and went on to become the drug Actof. This was the drug that helped to control his father’s diabetes, along with changes in diet...
2015-12-01 - A pair of LAS alumni responsible for momentous breakthroughs in science have been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 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 National Inventors Hall of...
2015-12-01 - A monstrous whale rams and sinks the whaling ship Essex, and the ship’s surviving crew members struggle to stay alive in whaleboats while attempting to reach South America. The 1820 maritime disaster served as inspiration for Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” A film of the story—“In the Heart of the Sea,” based on a book of the same name that won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction—opened on...
2015-12-01 - A student in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences who has presented her award-winning research on statistical climate change modeling to Illinois legislators has been named a prestigious Marshall Scholar, for postgraduate study in the United Kingdom.Leah Matchett, a senior from Grand Haven, Mich., pursuing a double major in global studies and geology, is one of more than 30 students from...
2015-12-01 - Ted Brown remembers the day he drove a car inside the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology–the large, interdisciplinary laboratory that anchors the northern edge of the University of Illinois campus. It was the late 1980s, and the beautiful building was still under construction, so Brown drove into the large atrium space, which was filled with construction...
2015-12-01 - Seven University of Illinois researchers have been named to the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list for 2015, meaning that they produce some of the most influential work in their fields."About 3,000 researchers earned this distinction ... ranking among the top 1 percent most cited for their subject field and year of publication, earning them the mark of exceptional impact," said Thomson...
2015-12-01 - World leaders met in Paris for the United Nations’ 21st Conference of the Parties climate talks from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, reaching an agreement on climate change mitigation efforts at the end of the conference. Illinois atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain was among the many scientists worldwide who contributed data to the Global Carbon Budget report. Jain talked about the COP21 agreement with...
2015-12-01 - When David Kranz was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, his parents would pack their six children into the station wagon and head up to Wisconsin. There, he and his identical twin brother tracked down snakes and turtles, and went swimming and fishing. These trips fostered a love for biology, and today Kranz still travels to Wisconsin to go fishing. But his love of biology also...
2015-12-01 - When you think about all the ways to take medicine, you might imagine pills, bottles, nasal sprays, or—take a breath—needles. Researchers at Illinois, however, are working on what they say is a more effective way to deliver drugs: Tiny, swimming biological machines in your bloodstream. That’s not all. In fact, swimming “biobots” are just one of the ideas being researched at...
2015-12-01 - Five University of Illinois faculty members, including four in the College of LAS, have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for 2016—the second year in a row that the Urbana-Champaign campus has garnered more of these awards than any other single institution.The fellowship recipients are Eugene Avrutin, a professor of history...
2015-11-01 - Leslie Reagan is a well-respected professor of history who joined Illinois faculty in 1992. But this past Oct. 16, she was Leah Schwartz, an outspoken, disaffected factory worker from the year 1913 who makes button holes all day.She was a lively participant at a boisterous gathering in Greenwich Village, where she struggled to draw attention to the...
2015-11-01 - A University of Illinois political science professor has been appointed to a White House team that’s applying insights from social and behavioral science to improve access to federal programs.Jake Bowers began his stint with President Obama’s year-old Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) last month and will continue with it through next summer. Bowers said it...
2015-11-01 - Myotonic dystrophy type 1, the most common form of muscular dystrophy, is like a hydra, attacking the body in several ways. That’s why it’s significant news that researchers at Illinois report that they’ve added new capabilities to an experimental drug agent to counter the disease’s pathology in three ways. “We’ve rationally designed something to target multiple pathways, which...
2015-11-01 - A team of investigators based at Illinois has been awarded an $8 million grant over five years to study DNA structure as part of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s 4D Nucleome Program. For years genome-mapping technology has understood DNA as a linear code, but that’s not how it exists in the cell: it’s tangled up in 3D inside the nucleus, with higher- and lower-...
2015-11-01 - Here’s an unsettling thought on a topic we thought was settled: Supervolcanoes, defined as massive eruptions with potentially global consequences, don’t blow up for the reasons we thought they did, according to new research by a geologist at the University of Illinois.Conventional models predict that volcanoes blow when the mechanics of internal pressure gets too high. But a study by Patricia...
2015-11-01 - Most people on campus who knew Lincoln Hall before its renovation appreciate its vast improvement since it reopened in 2012. It turns out that people off campus are impressed, too.Lincoln Hall has been awarded a 2015 Citation of Merit in American Institute of Architects Illinois’ Honor Awards program, in the Frank Lloyd Wright category...