LAS News Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

2013-12-01 - “Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms: Genealogy, Theory, Performance” rocked the University of Illinois campus on December 5-6, bringing together students, faculty, artists, and spectators from all over the U.S. to analyze and celebrate the roles of women of color and feminism in two genres rarely bought...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...