2014-05-01
- Three professors from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have been named 2014 Guggenheim Fellows for their achievement and exceptional promise, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.The trio includes Asef Bayat, professor of sociology and the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor in...
2014-05-01 - A professor of communication and executive vice provost for faculty and academic affairs at the University of Illinois has been selected to serve as the next Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Barbara J. Wilson, who joined the University in 2000, will begin her new role pending approval by the Board of Trustees....
2014-05-01 - The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has announced a third round of selections for its Centennial Gallery of Excellence, in honor of its 100-year anniversary. Eighteen more entries have been added to the growing list of noteworthy people, events, buildings, and groups in the college since it was formed in 1913. Almost 70 faculty, staff, alumni, buildings, and events are now featured in the...
2014-05-01 - It’s hard to know what’s more frightening: invasive fungal infections, which kill half of the 3 million people afflicted with them every year, or amphotericin, the drug that’s been used to fight the infections even though it’s nearly as deadly as the infections themselves. Researchers in the Department of Chemistry, however, have...
2014-05-01 - Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have just pulled off one of the oldest carnival tricks in the book: correctly estimating weight by sight alone. It wasn’t your grandmother they just exposed, however—it was the largest known galaxy cluster in the distant universe. By precisely measuring how much gravity from the El Gordo (Spanish for “fat one”) galaxy cluster warps images of more...
2014-04-01 - With his trademark cigar nested between two fingers, Mark Twain once strolled in broad daylight through the heart of London—in a blue bathrobe.The stunt drew a crowd of curious onlookers, as Twain intended, but this wasn’t the first time the famed writer pushed the envelope with regard to his public image. On another occasion, he invited a throng of reporters to interview him at his home as he...
2014-04-01 - Feng Sheng Hu, head of the Department of Plant Biology, was greeting new faculty on campus last fall when he met a professor of statistics. He asked politely about her work, expecting a lesson in probability or some other statistical concept, but to his surprise she began talking about something he’s been studying for years: climate change. It turns out that Bo Li, the professor of statistics...
2014-04-01 - If you examine the border counties of southern Texas, as Julie Dowling did, you’ll learn an interesting thing about race. According to the 2010 census, the population there is about 80 percent white, but if you go there, you’ll see something very different. “If you walk into those towns, you would not see people who are all light-skinned, and speak only English,” says Dowling, a professor of...
2014-04-01 - According to recent research at Illinois, the goings-on at your state capital and other public offices are more clearly influenced by you and your neighbors’ personality types than we previously knew. Political science professors Jeffery Mondak and Damarys Canache compared personality data from more than 600,000 Americans who had responded to an online...
2014-03-01 - Over 800 orange and blue cookies and a table full of cupcakes arranged into the state of Illinois were handed out to students in celebration of the University’s 147th birthday last month, which ended the second annual I Love Illinois Week. The weeklong series of events is the brainchild of the student philanthropy organization 1867 Society. “We celebrate Homecoming in the fall, but there really...
2014-03-01 - Certain languages—Spanish, French, and German, to name a few—are mainstays in foreign language education in the United States. In the College of LAS, however, a small group called the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Program is preparing students for the reality that other languages are also key to success in an increasingly interconnected...
2014-03-01 - Want your child to do better at math? Ask her to try guessing. Psychology researchers found that children who practiced tasks that required them to approximate, or roughly evaluate, the number of objects in a set—without counting them—performed significantly better on arithmetic tests immediately afterward than students who evaluated other object...
2014-03-01 - A researcher at Illinois says that one of the most productive crop plants ever known—sugarcane—can be modified to become even more viable and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Stephen Long, professor of plant biology, and other researchers report that they can increase sugarcane’s geographic range, boost its photosynthetic rate by 30...
2014-03-01 - Chemistry researchers at Illinois have created an “enzyme mimic” that could shorten a key step of the drug discovery process from months to minutes. Professor M. Christina White, who conducted the research with graduate student Paul Gormisky, reports that they created a catalyst—the “mimic”—that can alter the chemical profiles of...
2014-02-01 - Literary giants, biotechnology pioneers, and a famous insect festival are among the latest additions to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Gallery of Excellence. Created in honor of the college’s 100-year anniversary, the virtual gallery features noteworthy people and ideas throughout LAS history, dating back to 1913. The gallery now features almost 50 faculty, staff, alumni, places, and...
2014-02-01 - An initiative in the College of LAS to strengthen the study of humanities is gaining steam, thanks to a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at cross-campus collaboration. The grant, announced in January, will support the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH), which has been working to create new avenues for...
2014-02-01 - One day prior to World War II, a group of outdoor enthusiasts from the University of Illinois were playing softball when an angry bull burst onto the scene. As players fled before the charging beast, one of them, William Abbott Oldfather, a classics professor, picked up the bat and fought the bull like a matador, dodging its horns and landing blows as the animal barreled past. Finally, the bull...
2014-02-01 - If you can’t resist an underdog story, look no further than the Illini Chess Club. With no coaches, scholarships, or grand masters—trademarks of today’s powerhouse university chess teams—the club is sending a team to the national “Final Four” tournament for the second year in a row. The team of four LAS students will play in the President’s Cup in Manhattan in April, after they placed third at...
2014-01-01 - William T. Greenough, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois and a pioneer in studies of brain plasticity and development, died December 18 in Seattle, of complications associated with Lewy Body Dementia. As a researcher at Illinois, Greenough explored the neural basis of learning and memory and the effects of aging,...
2014-01-01 - In one of the strangest twists in history, the wrong turn by a car in Sarajevo resulted in World War I. There had already been one attempt on the life of Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Hungary, on the morning of June 28, 1914, explains John Vasquez, LAS professor of political science. An assassin tossed a bomb at the archduke’s car, but according...
2014-01-01 - Today we call it influence, clout, “who you know.” It gets junior into the top school, swings the big business deal, gets legislation passed or killed. When exposed, we say it’s unfair and corrupt, and we might even get the law involved. But in France of the 1700s it was the way of the world—at least until heads started rolling during the French Revolution. In the years prior, however, the term...
2014-01-01 - She shed light on a dark side of field research. Now LAS anthropologist Kathryn Clancy has been recognized by Nature magazine as one of their “10 people who mattered” in 2013. It began with an ugly discovery. Clancy had always considered her own doctoral field research to be a “magical” experience, with long days gathering biological...
2014-01-01 - The principles of mathematics have not changed. The tools used to teach them during the past century, however, have changed drastically, and it so happens that the University of Illinois has the second largest historical collection of math models in the world. They’re now on display for anyone curious about the evolution of this discipline. Some 355 math models dating back to the early 20th...
2013-12-01 - Certain scenes from his childhood, from the sugar fields of Puerto Rico to the streets of Chicago, have always remained in the mind of Luis Gutierrez during his career as a U.S. legislator. One memory is from San Sebastian, where he would see lines of “cutters”—those who harvested the sugar cane with machetes—with their scars and leather-like, sun-dried skin, waiting patiently and respectfully...
2013-12-01 - Planners for the historic Lincoln Hall renovation knew they were aiming high when they set out to earn “gold” certification through the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) environmental sustainability standards. Not only did the project earn gold status, but it did one better. The USGBC recently awarded the Lincoln Hall project its highest...