2024-10-07
- John Kelly (BS, ’86, economics) spends his office hours as an economist with the US Department of Labor in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, it’s his work with his non-profit that feeds his soul.
Kelly founded A Meal to Heal following the death of his mother when his family found comfort sharing a meal at their family’s favorite restaurant....
2024-10-04 - Violeta J. Rodriguez, professor of psychology in the department’s clinical/community division, recently received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award for early career researchers. She will use the funding to advance her innovative research on...
2024-10-02 - More than 50 new tenure-track faculty members arrived in the College of LAS this fall, in departments from history to political science, statistics, Asian American studies, biochemistry, sociology, and many more. Some come with faculty experience from other universities and institutions, and others are taking their first tenure-track position. Read on for profiles of a few of them along...
2024-10-02 - Now in his 10th year at the University of Illinois, Simon Rogers studies rheology, the science of how materials flow and deform. The professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and native of New Zealand is highly respected in his field, being awarded the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award from the Society of Rheology in 2022. He is editor-in-chief...
2024-09-30 - When it comes to understanding language acquisition, there are few scholars as renowned as Silvina Montrul.“In her field of second language acquisition, it’s not a stretch to say that (Montrul is) the single most impactful scholar of her generation worldwide,” said Colin Phillips, distinguished scholar-teacher and director of the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland.The...
2024-09-27 - Every text from Jazmin Olivas’ parents end with the words “Echale ganas,” which, translated from Spanish to English, mean “keep giving it your all” and serve as a constant reminder of both her support system and her future. Now, after receiving an award for her work with immigrants, Olivas is beginning to find her own way. Olivas, a senior studying ...
2024-09-26 - Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology demonstrated that emotion enhances memory for contextual details, challenging the view that emotion impairs the ability to remember such information. The report was led by Paul Bogdan, who is currently a postdoc at Duke University, and Florin and Sanda Dolcos, professors of...
2024-09-26 - In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tackled a thorny problem: How do nutritional stress, viral infections, and exposure to pesticides together influence honey bee survival? By looking at all three stressors together, the scientists found that good nutrition enhances honey bee resilience against the other threats. Their findings are detailed in the...
2024-09-24 - The Big Ten Academic Alliance has pledged $30,000 in grants to a proposal from the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota to build transgender studies across the Big Ten campuses. Now, faculty members in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies are leading efforts to make the endeavor a reality. Transgender studies is a relatively new...
2024-09-20 - Jane Desmond remembers the day she and several colleagues drove to the great ape center in Des Moines to visit Kanzi, a bonobo who is one of the first non-human primates to show an understanding of human language. The center’s researcher asked Kanzi if his visitors could take photos of him. But Kanzi, communicating through printed symbols, said, “No photos.” Instead, the ape...
2024-09-20 - Ricardo Diaz still remembers the night chemistry professor Joaquin Rodriguez-Lopez walked into a room full of kids and told them to throw ketchup on a volunteer wearing a special shirt. Soon the room was enveloped in ketchup, laughter, and gasps as they watched the shirt magically repel everything they threw at it. In an instant, they...
2024-09-20 - Kameno Bell knows that fumbling is inevitable — in football, and in life. Bell (BS, ’92, biology; MD, ’01), a former fullback for the Fighting Illini, has excelled in the classroom and on the gridiron, playing two seasons of professional football for the Miami Dolphins before launching an ongoing career in emergency medicine. In recognition of his...
2024-09-20 - How are schools of thought defined? The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has more than 60 academic units, and some, like English and chemistry, have been within LAS since the beginning. But how is it that the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, for example, resides in LAS, while physics, the science of matter and energy, is within...
2024-09-20 - For evolution, ecology and behavior professor Alison Bell, asking big questions seems to be a lifelong habit. As an undergraduate studying the history and philosophy of science at the University of Chicago, many of those questions were epistemological: How do we know what we know? How is knowledge...
2024-09-20 - Professor of classics Clara Bosak-Schroeder’s first book, “Other Natures: Environmental Encounters With Ancient Greek Ethnography,” (UC Press 2020), explored how ancient Greek authors cast humans and nonhumans in complex, inter-dependent relationships. Her latest work blends creative nonfiction and scholarship to examine ancient monuments. ...
2024-09-20 - Before social media, before podcasts, before streaming television — it was 1993, and Eboo Patel was a freshman hoping to find his way while living on West Gregory Drive in Allen Hall. And that made all the difference. The eclectic, diverse residence hall community became a rich environment where Patel (BA, ’96, sociology) could debate the issues of...
2024-09-19 - Thanks to a serendipitous discovery and a lot of painstaking work, scientists can now build biohybrid molecules that combine the homing powers of DNA with the broad functional repertoire of proteins — without having to synthesize them one by one, researchers report in a new study. Using a naturally occurring process, laboratories can harness the existing molecule-building capacities of bacteria...
2024-09-16 - Taking inspiration from enzymes, chemists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a catalyst to simplify the synthesis of ethers, key functional components of many drugs, foods, personal care items, and other consumer goods. The catalyst puts the two chemical ingredients in just the right proximity and position to come together, bypassing the need for the steps and quantities...
2024-09-16 - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students Gabrielle Capone, Leland Pan, and Frankie Ward are recipients of the Voyager Scholarship, the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service. Capone, who is majoring in geography and geographic information science, is planning to conduct community-based research within the Global South, utilizing geospatial...
2024-09-12 - The word “atlas,” may conjure images of giant books chock full of maps and a dizzying array of facts and figures. However, the new book “The World Atlas of Rivers, Estuaries, and Deltas” tells...
2024-09-12 - According to two psychologists, the field of psychological science has a problem with the concept of self-control. It has named self-control both a “trait” — a key facet of personality involving attributes like conscientiousness, grit and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification — and a “state,” a fleeting condition that can best be described as willpower. These two concepts are at odds with...
2024-09-11 - The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has welcomed a record-breaking class for the fall 2024 semester. With a freshman enrollment of 9,008, the new class brings record total student enrollment at 59,238, including on-campus and online students. This total includes 37,140 undergraduates and also a record number of 20,765 graduate students. The new class includes 2,656 freshmen students in...
2024-09-11 - A new book co-written by a political scientist explores the road to the White House through three distinct eras of presidential campaigning. The book, “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era,” draws on seven decades of data from public and...
2024-09-06 - John J. Bird was one of the most prominent and influential Black men in the state of Illinois in the latter part of the 19th century, and he was the first Black board member for an essentially all-white university in Illinois – and likely in the U.S. – when he was appointed in 1873 to the board of the Illinois Industrial University, which would later become the University of Illinois Urbana-...
2024-09-05 - I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory in Morrill Hall. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow and withering. Some of the dying tomatoes have flowered. I see one or two baby tomatoes on a couple of spindly plants....