LAS News Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

2014-12-01 -     Five professors in the College of LAS have received National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships, a prestigious award given to faculty and scholars for advanced research. The U of I is the only institution to be awarded more than three of the fellowships for 2015. The...

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...

2014-12-01 - Two professors in the College of Liberal Arts& Sciences are among the latest researchers elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a prestigious scientific society composed of those who have made outstanding contributions to their field.Brendan A. Harley, a...

2014-12-01 - Regardless of gender, youth who enter puberty ahead of their peers are at a heightened risk of anxiety, conflict with friends and family, social problems, and other problems associated with depression, according to a groundbreaking new study by a ...

2014-11-01 -     When New York City firemen suffered burns, they would often request to be taken to the Cornell Burn Center, in part because the center used hydrocolloid dressings, which sped their recovery time. One of the key people in the development of hydrocolloid dressings was Laura Bolton...

2014-11-01 -     More than once, Alan Parsons (BA, '71, history) has parachuted into the Panama Canal from a helicopter. He did it multiple times as an Army Ranger in the 1970s, practicing jumps into water. At about 100 feet above the canal, you have to pull a pin that releases two of the...

2014-11-01 -     Ethan Zohn, a former professional soccer player, won the third season of the Survivor reality television series in 2002, but his greatest survival battle was yet to come, as he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009. When Zohn’s cancer returned in 2011, a new drug had just...

2014-11-01 - A couple things dwell at the forefront of Merle Bowen’s mind these days, as terrible stories of Ebola have put nerves on edge around the world. One is that Ebola is indeed a deadly virus. The other is that fear of the affliction is only making matters worse. Bowen, director of the...

2014-11-01 - “Life is an adventure,” because you never know what path your career will follow, says Laura Bolton, one of six LAS award winners this year. Bolton majored in psychology but ended up becoming a leader in wound care management. Another 2014 award winner set his sights on music, but instead made...

2014-11-01 - Olivia Widalski, a junior majoring in English in LAS, has landed a job that must sound as good as Shakespeare to her favorite English professor, Christopher Freeburg. She works in computer technical support.Granted, it’s just an after-school job on...

2014-11-01 - As a professor of mathematics, Jayadev Athreya knows a thing or two about numbers, but there’s one math question that eludes him: How many children have been exposed to the new and innovative programming of the Illinois Geometry Lab (IGL) since it...

2014-11-01 -     When Patrick Walsh first arrived in India with prototypes of an LED solar-powered lantern, his goal was to simply demonstrate that they could bring light to isolated areas in developing countries. So he was shocked when a man in India came up to him and asked to buy one of his...

2014-11-01 -     William F. Banholzer cannot say much about what he considers some of his most important work in a long career in charge of research and development portfolios measured in the billions of dollars. That’s because this work was classified research on radar-absorbing materials for...