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...
2015-12-01 - 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...
2015-11-01 - 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...
2015-11-01 - A new simulation system based on computer algorithms developed at the University of Illinois promises cosmologists an expanded suite of galaxy models—a necessary first step to developing more accurate, cost-effective, and relevant insights into the formation of the universe.The feasibility of this method—called machine learning—has been laid out in two recent papers written by...
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-...
2015-10-01 - An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Illinois have received $2 million over three years from the National Institutes of Health to develop new insights in neuroscience and create diagnostic and therapeutic tools in fighting neurological diseases. Jonathan Sweedler, professor of chemistry, Martha Gillette, professor of...
2015-10-01 - Amanda de Souza cradles a plastic petri dish in her hands. Tiny plants press against the lid; their roots form a delicate web. It’s hard to imagine that hope for millions of people may lie inside something so small, so seemingly fragile.But don’t let them fool you. These plants are hardy. Cassava thrives in the marginal soil of developing countries, where it is a life-saving commodity. In Africa...
2015-10-01 - The British Empire was not the model of peace and stability, the “Pax Britannica,” as it’s often portrayed. The common narrative of the empire’s rise and fall is misleading, says a University of Illinois history professor. Dissent and disruption were the rule, not the exception, according to Antoinette Burton, in her new book “The...
2015-10-01 - We’ve long known that there is ice on Mars, but on Sept. 28, NASA confirmed evidence of running water on the red planet—which makes all the difference in the world, says Illinois astronomy professor Leslie Looney.The discovery was made by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which used an imaging spectrometer to determine that mysterious streaks on the...
2015-10-01 - There’s good reason to be optimistic about the future of the humanities, but a sustained and innovative commitment at educational institutions such as the University of Illinois is required to maintain them in their role as an essential part of American democracy, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities said during his visit to campus.William Adams spent two nights on campus as...
2015-10-01 - A chemistry professor at Illinois has been named one of the first recipients of an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to help early-career women launch their research.Alison Fout will receive a $50,000 grant for receiving the Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Sciences. She will apply the grant toward her...