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...
2013-12-01 - Growing up in Chicago’s Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood, Audrey Petty would pass the imposing Chicago Housing Authority’s Robert Taylor Homes on the way to piano lessons. Those 28 drab, concrete high-rises, containing more than 4,400 apartments arranged in horseshoe clusters along the Dan Ryan Expressway, were practically visible from Petty’s doorstep, and yet she saw them as a foreign, mysterious...
2013-12-01 - When Douglas Simpson arrived on the University of Illinois campus in 1985 to take his first professorship straight out of grad school, the time-traveling movie Back to the Future ruled the theaters and the U of I Department of Statistics had just been founded. Today, the field of statistics is booming, and that’s something no one but a time...
2013-11-01 - Call it a happy accident: Stephen Elledge (BS ’78, chemistry) was doing his postdoctoral research at Stanford University in 1984 when he stumbled across a family of genes known as RNRs. Through RNRs, he discovered the genes that sense damaged DNA and trigger its repair—a process vital to the prevention of cancer and other diseases. “It was all an...
2013-11-01 - One solution leads to another. Or, as protein researchers at Illinois have recently found, one solution can lead to hundreds of others—and a greater understanding of how life works. Biochemists in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences were amongst 15 scientists in a multidisciplinary study across three institutions to identify the function of a single, mysterious bacterial protein. In the...
2013-11-01 - “It’s been over an hour since we poked the patient with something sharp. Get him a lumbar puncture.” —Dr. Gregory House Dr. Gregory House of the TV show House was famous for being rude, abrasive, and a lousy communicator—but also a brilliant doctor. In real life, however, people prefer their doctors to be both brilliant and caring, not to mention good communicators. That’s why...
2013-11-01 - Joel Coats’ first laboratory had no tables, no beakers, and no walls. His first lab was a living laboratory—the family farm on which he grew up in northwest Ohio. “I knew every tree and every bird nest and every kind of bug in the field or garden,” says Coats (MS ’72, PhD ’74, entomology). “It was the perfect laboratory for a...
2013-11-01 - Any nightmare vision of what lies in the office of May Berenbaum, longtime head of the Department of Entomology and founder of the Insect Fear Film Festival, is hereby dismissed. There are no glass cases filled with hissing cockroaches, no exotic spiders, no giant moths flapping about the lights. There is, however, something vital to...
2013-11-01 - The world of Ken and Ann Slaw changed forever in 1996 on the day their 4-year-old son Andrew slammed his hand in the sliding door—and felt little pain. This incident led to his diagnosis of Familial Dysautonomia (FD), a rare disease that afflicts only an estimated 300 people in the world. “It was the longest night of our lives,” says Ken Slaw (BS ’79,...
2013-11-01 - If you ever find a periodic table published between 1926 and World War II, you might notice the two-letter abbreviation for Illinois—Il—listed as element 61. No, it’s not a printing mistake, and yes, it carries a reference to the University of Illinois. It stands for illinium, the name of which has since been removed from the periodic table and yet remains a symbol of how science evolves. The...
2013-11-01 - For most of his career, Paul W. Boltz’s job was predicting the future. “Alone among social scientists, only economists are expected to predict the future,” says Boltz (MS, '71, PhD, '74, economics) a long-time economist for the mutual fund company, T. Rowe Price. “Nobody asks sociologists what society is going to be like 30 years from now. It just doesn’t happen. But...
2013-11-01 - Two of the winners of the 2013 LAS Alumni Achievement Awards were pioneers in the truest sense of the word, for they were the first in their families to ever attend college, let alone reach the top of their field. But all award winners this year were pioneers in their own right. Of the winners, two grappled with finding answers about life-threatening diseases—one in the area of cancer and the...
2013-11-01 - Richard L. Wasson (BS, '53, chemistry) worked on fragrances and flavors for many years of his career at the Monsanto Company. But Wasson had a way of adding a special flavor to just about anything he did, from playing trombone in the Marching Illini, mapping wildflowers at a St. Louis nature preserve, or helping with the annual Cubs-Cardinals game as part of his work for...
2013-11-01 - Edna Greene Medford will never forget the eerie feeling that crept over her when she was driving down the long, narrow road leading to the Westover Plantation in Virginia in the mid 1990s. It was night, and the trees on both sides of the dirt road crowded in on her, she recalls. “It made me think about the people who had lived and died on the plantation—people who had never seen freedom,” says...
2013-10-01 - The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is creating a Gallery of Excellence in honor of its 100-year anniversary. This virtual gallery features people and events throughout LAS history, which dates back to 1913. With the college’s broad range of academic disciplines (more than 60 departments and units are housed in LAS), the gallery features those who have made breakthroughs in research,...
2013-10-01 - The period surrounding World War II was a unique one at the University of Illinois, and Gladys Dawson was in the perfect position to observe it. During the war there was such a dearth of men—save for the military training programs—that they jokingly called it a “girl’s school,” but in the aftermath men flooded to campus in such numbers that the University could hardly handle them all. The flux...
2013-10-01 - In the summer issue of LAS News magazine, we reported how English professor Bruce Weirick helped obtain the Carl Sandburg papers for the University of Illinois. As it turns out, gaining rights to the great poet’s collection was just the start of the unusual story of how it finally came to be a campus treasure.As told by George...
2013-10-01 - There are certain milestones we all look for in a baby: first smile, first steps, first words, etc. Perhaps only a psychologist would question the importance of whether a baby realizes that animals have internal organs. Interestingly, researchers in the College of LAS have determined that babies do. Professor of psychology Renee Baillargeon, who...
2013-10-01 - A former faculty member of the University of Illinois Department of Chemistry is one of three scientists who received a Nobel Prize on Wednesday for developing computer simulations for complex chemical processes. Martin Karplus, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Harvard University who is also affiliated with the Universite de Strasbourg in...
2013-10-01 - As usual, things are looking up at the University of Illinois Observatory. The same goes for the mood as the historic, 117-year-old telescope that lies at the roots of the astronomy program has been renovated for the first time in almost 60 years. Bryan Dunne, assistant chair and professor in the Department of Astronomy, says the 12-inch Brashear...
2013-09-01 - Those of us who can’t pass up a chance to be seen with the Great Emancipator have another, easily accessible opportunity on the University of Illinois campus just off—where else?—Lincoln Avenue. Just in time for Homecoming, a life-sized sculpture of Abraham Lincoln is seated comfortably on a bench in front of the Alice Campbell Alumni Center, 601 S. Lincoln Ave., Urbana, home of the University of...
2013-09-01 - A promising drug that has successfully treated dogs afflicted by cancer is headed for possible human clinical trials pending a review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. PAC-1, a compound developed by a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois and tested at the U of I Veterinary Teaching Hospital, could be headed for human clinical trials by mid-2014. An anonymous gift of $2...
2013-09-01 - A longtime faculty member at the U of I has been awarded a $1 million grant to advance his groundbreaking organic chemistry research in the discovery and development of new chemical catalysts. Scott E. Denmark, the R. C. Fuson Professor of Chemistry, received the prestigious and highly competitive W. M. Keck Foundation Science and Engineering...
2013-09-01 - After a century of togetherness, it’s hard to imagine a time when the liberal arts and sciences weren’t mentioned in the same breath at the University of Illinois. Prior to 1913, however, when the College of Science merged with the College of Literature and Arts to form the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a happy marriage between the two did not seem likely. Indeed, marriage was the analogy...
2013-09-01 - Breaking news: There is a good reason why people who drive fast are described as having a “heavy foot.” A University of Illinois survey has shown that shoe size determines how fast a person will drive. The bigger the shoe, the faster the driver. “But is this really true?” asks Ellen Fireman, an LAS senior lecturer in statistics. On one level, it...