2015-05-01
-
Graduation Day
At left, the Commencement procession with two lines of graduates being escorted by a military officer in 1930. Today, a much larger and more diverse Illinois undergraduate student body graduates in iconic blue robes. You can often find robed students waiting in line for hours for their turn to participate in the Illini tradition of taking a photo at the Alma Mater....
2015-05-01 - The Illinois Trial Team is unlike any other organization on campus. The 30-member team receives a case from the American Mock Trial Association (AMTA), and for one academic year they compete against other universities across the nations for who can argue the case better. With practices two or three times a week, for three hours each time, the...
2015-05-01 - During the mid-1990s, with images of starving children in North Korea seared into Byung-Ho Chung’s mind, he met with a North Korean official to offer a shipment of anti-parasitic drugs that could help fight malnutrition. The official brusquely refused.“We do not have such a dirty problem in our republic,” the official told Chung. Undeterred, Chung changed tack, and during the next meeting he...
2015-04-01 - Jerrod Henderson knows how little things make a big difference to a child. He recalls that when he was in the sixth grade, growing up in North Carolina, he traveled with a youth organization to Baltimore, Md., to see the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference. At some point, they let the kids wander around the career fair. “They used to give all these free goodies at the career fair,”...
2015-04-01 - In the spring of 2013, a group of U of I college students went to McAllen, Texas on a service trip. The focus of the trip was immigration, and one of the students spent a day working with an immigrant who wanted to become a taxi driver, teaching him the rules of the road. The group also had a trip facilitator to ensure smooth execution of the trip.Little did these two know, they would one day be...
2015-04-01 - The Spanish galleons that ruled the seas some 500 years ago were carrying more than gold, silk, and guns as they circled the globe. They also carried with them colonies of fire ants that exist to this day.A study at the University of Illinois, reported in the journal Molecular Ecology, reveals that 16th-century Spanish galleons shuttled tropical fire ants (Solenopsis geminata) from...
2015-04-01 - An initiative at Illinois known for its animated educational videos is part of an effort to teach subsistence farmers gardening methods that could not only help them put food on their tables but also conserve water, deal with drought, and make an income.This educational effort, led in large part by nonprofit groups and private donors, is getting a boost from Scientific Animations Without Borders...
2015-04-01 - A walk with the affable Larry Harris, Jr., across campus is not for the shy of heart. He may not know all the 42,000 students who attend the University of Illinois, but as he waves and greets his way across the grassy Quad and through the corridors of the Illini Union, you get the feeling that given a bit more time, he just might.“There are a lot of people who go to this university,” says Harris...
2015-03-01 - Two professors in the College of LAS are recipients of 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Alison Fout, a professor of chemistry, and Ryan Foley, a professor of astronomy and of physics, are among 127 other career scientists and scholars from 57 universities chosen for the fellowship. The two-year program awards the fellows $50,000 to pursue their choice of...
2015-03-01 - Today we know better than to search for secret tunnels that lead to ancient cities and piles of treasure at the center of Earth, but the question of what lies some 4,000 miles below our feet is still one of humanity’s great mysteries. A research team at the U of I,however, is using seismic waves to shake loose new revelations about our planet’s core.Using a novel application of earthquake-reading...
2015-03-01 - Teaching a dog to sit, stay and come is one thing, but the Illini Service Dogs team is training their dogs to do everything from opening doors and flipping lights to helping a fallen person to his feet. Although fairly new to the university, the Illini Service Dogs organization is now well known across campus for turning dogs into service companions for people with disabilities. The all-...
2015-03-01 - Washington, D.C., can be an intimidating place even for seasoned professionals and politicians. For interns it can be even more daunting, which is why the Illinois in Washington program has been working since 2006 to ensure that U of I students interning in the nation’s capital have a fruitful experience. Illinois in Washington is available to all U of I students (though the majority are from...
2015-03-01 - In a world of tweets and text messages, it’s hard to imagine the effort that goes into writing long letters by hand, let alone one in which a man goes on for many pages, calling his lady “his heart’s life, his desire, his sorrow’s cure.“ Today, most text messages say all of that with a smiley face symbol.According to Martin Camargo, University of Illinois professor of...
2015-03-01 - What can emblems created hundreds of years ago tell us about how human society evolved? Quite a bit, actually—so much so that a small, energetic undergraduate student research project in the College of LAS focused on making emblems easier to study is drawing attention to not only the subject matter itself but how students can learn and help the study of humanities evolve.In addition to the...
2015-02-01 - Five students enrolled in the College of LAS have been awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships to study abroad this spring semester, helping to make the University of Illinois one of the most represented schools in the program.Hei Chan (integrative biology), Ladonte Price (chemistry), Tatiana...
2015-02-01 - Emerging humanities initiatives at the University of Illinois are receiving a boost thanks to a $2,050,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities announced. The grant, coming on the heels of another major grant to IPRH from the Mellon Foundation last year, will be used to create research groups...
2015-02-01 - There are certain corridors in academia where natural brilliance—an innate, high level of intelligence or talent—is considered to be the main ingredient for success. A researcher at the University of Illinois has raised the question of why women are underrepresented in these fields.A new study by U of I psychology professor Andrei Cimpian and...
2015-02-01 - While the recent Groundhog Day snowstorm was a headache to millions of people from Chicago to Maine, it was nothing but enlightenment at 40,000 feet, where University of Illinois professor of atmospheric sciences Bob Rauber was on the maiden scientific voyage of a new radar system that provided a view of snow like nobody has seen before.As the massive Nor’easter pounded Boston and other areas in...
2015-02-01 - Long after the new walls have gone up, classrooms have been upgraded, and Lincoln Hall looks like new again, the renovation is receiving its last strokes of the brush. New art from Illinois artists has been installed in key areas of the revived building.Recently, in the Dean’s Suite on the second floor, Holly Wolf-Mattick (MFA ’02), of Woodstock...
2015-01-01 - Biofuels may be good for the environment, but farmers who decide to grow bioenergy crops face risk like any other commercial venture. Researchers at the University of Illinois, however, have made growing the crops easier by mapping where they thrive best.Atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain, along with agriculture and consumer economics professor...
2015-01-01 - Prestigious as it was, news in December that the University of Illinois had received five National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships wasn’t even the full story. Two recent graduates from the College of LAS were also named recipients of the fellowships. Additionally, three other alumni have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for...
2015-01-01 - Step by step, the University of Illinois has been building one of the best academic programs in Hindi in the nation. In its latest improvement, however, students and the instructor don’t even have to leave their seats.This past fall, Mithilesh Mishra, senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and director of programming in Hindi and Urdu,...
2015-01-01 - As the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes this month, adopting rules of procedure are among the first orders of business. Pretty mundane stuff, it would seem—but in fact it determines the very balance of power throughout the entire federal government.Gisela Sin, a political scientist in the College of LAS, has analyzed more than a century of House...
2015-01-01 - Some issues require scholars in both the humanities and sciences to fully understand. As a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies reveals, the Black Death is one of those topics.“Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death” is the subject of a new journal, The Medieval Globe, created in hopes of...
2014-12-01 - From Long-Hand to CalculatorsApplied mathematics professor A. H. Taub (at left) writes a shock wave problem on a chalkboard in 1948. Though chalk and erasers are still used in classrooms, these days students also rely on calculators and computers to solve problems.From Pencil and Paper to LaptopsIllinois students used to make sure they had plenty of paper for taking notes in lectures. Today, it’s...