LAS professors bring honor and recognition to the college.

Have an honor you'd like to share with the Office of the Dean? Email us.

April 2017

  • Renee Baillargeon

    Renee Baillargeon, professor of psychology, received the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. It recognizes her continuous lifetime contributions to the scientific body of knowledge and understanding of children's development.

  • Matthew Ando

    Matthew Ando, professor and chair of mathematics, won the Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award. The award is among the 2017 Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership.

  • Scott Denmark

    Scott E. Denmark of chemistry has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Denmark is one of 228 new members, including national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders.

  • Luisa-Elena Delgado

    Brian Jefferson of geography and geographic information science and Luisa-Elena Delgado of Spanish and Portuguese have been awarded Criticism & Interpretive Theory Junior Research Fellowships from the University of Illinois' Unit for Criticism.

  • Trevor Birkenholtz

    Trevor Birkenholtz of geography and geographic information science was awarded the Robert McC. Netting Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. The award is in recognition of distinguished research and professional activities that bridge geography and anthropology.

  • Eduardo Ledesma

    Eduardo Ledesma of Spanish and Portuguese, Hong Jin of biochemistry, David Sarlah of chemistry, and Catharine Fairbairn of psychology have received the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award, which is granted to faculty based on scholarly productivity and contributions to the educational mission of their departments and the college.

  • Jonathan Ebel

    Jonathan Ebel , professor of religion, has been awarded a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Ebel is one of 173 scholars, artists and scientists named as 2017 Guggenheim Fellows. They were chosen from almost 3,000 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

  • WaÏl S. Hassan

    WaÏl S. Hassan has been elected as the American Comparative Literature Association's second vice president. Next year, he'll become vice president and will serve as president the year following. Hassan is a professor of professor of comparative and world literature and English.

  • Erik S. McDuffie

    Erik S. McDuffie is the recipient of a 2017 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. McDuffie, a professor of African American studies and history, is one of only 71 fellows chosen from nearly 1,200 applicants.

March 2017

  • Irvin Hunt

    Irvin Hunt, associate professor of English, has been awarded a 12-month Fellowship with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The foundation creates career development opportunities for faculty with promising research projects in an array of fields including English, critical dance studies, history, Mexican American and Latino/a studies, sociology, music, American studies, and philosophy.

  • Helaine Silverman

    Helaine Silverman, professor of anthropology, has been awarded the Sheth Distinguished Faculty award for International Achievement for her teaching, research, and acts of public service. Read more about the award.

  • Photo courtesy of Peninsula Daily News

    Sue Kieffer, professor emerita of geology, has received the 2017 Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Award of the American Geosciences Institute (AGI). The award is given to a recipient with consistent contributions of high-quality scientific achievements and service to the earth sciences and is a senior scientist nearing completion or has completed full-time regular employment.

February 2017

  • Jefferson Chan

    Four LAS faculty members have been selected as 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows. They include Joaquin Vieira of astronomy, and Jefferson Chan, David Sarlah, and Josh Vura-Weis, all of chemistry. The two-year, $60,000 fellowships are awarded yearly researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

  • Joon Kong

    Joon Kong, a professor and Centennial Scholar in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been elected to the College of Fellows at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. The AIMBE College of Fellows represents the most accomplished and distinguished medical and biological engineers responsible for innovation and discovery.

  • Charles Sing

    Charles Sing, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received a 2017 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal, "Developing the design rules of charge sequence to inform polymer self-assembly." The program will provide five years of support.

  • Feng Sheng Hu

    Feng Sheng Hu, the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of LAS, a professor of plant biology and the Ralph E. Grimm Professor in Geology, has been named a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. The honor recognizes Hu's outstanding contributions to his field.

  • Joey Cheng

    Joey Cheng, an assistant professor of Pscyhology, has been named an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star. The award recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research careers.

  • "Away Running," a young-adult novel by David Wright, an associate professor in the Department of English, has been recognized as one of the Outstanding International Books of the year by the United States Board on Books for Young People.

January 2017

  • Kevin Mumford

    History professor Kevin Mumford, author of "Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis," has received a 2017 Stonewall Book Award honoree in the Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award category. First awarded in 1971, award recognizes works of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience.

  • Michele Koven, an associate professor in the Department of Communication has won a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to pursue her research in in Portugal in 2017-18. She studies relationships between identity and language practices in migrant communities.

December 2016

November 2016

  • Yi Lu

    Six LAS faculty members have been named to the Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list for 2016 (previously known as the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list). They include crop sciences and plant biology professor Lisa Ainsworth, crop sciences and plant biology professor Stephen P. Long, chemistry professor Yi Lu, chemistry professor Catherine Murphy, plant biology professor Donald Ort, and psychology professor Brent Roberts.

  • Bruce Rhoads

    Bruce L. Rhoads, a professor of geography and geographic information science, and Chad M. Rienstra, a professor of chemistry, have been elected 2016 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for their efforts to advance science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

  • Photo courtesy of the Toynbee Prize Foundation

    Antoinette Burton has been named a University of Illinois Presidential Fellows. In this role, she'll help help build on the U of I System's long legacy of leadership in the arts and humanities. Burton is a professor of history, the Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

  • Ruby Mendenhall, associate professor of sociology and African American studies, received an Innovation Excellence Award from the International Data Corporation (IDC) for innovations in supercomputing. It recognizes "noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing technologies." The award was announced at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in November 2016.

  • Ned O'Gorman

    Ned O'Gorman, associate professor of communication, won the 2016 Bruce E. Gronbeck Political Communication Research Award from the The Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research and the Political Communication Division of the National Communication Association. The award honors Ned's new book, "The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11." The Gronbeck award is given to recognize outstanding work that addresses important issues in political communication.

  • Will Barley

    Will Barley, assistant professor of communication, won the National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's 2016 Outstanding Article Award for his article, "Anticipatory Work: How the Need to Represent Knowledge Across Boundaries Shapes Work Practices Within Them," published recently in Organizational Science.

  • Hyunjoon Kong

    Hyunjoon Kong, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Robert Morrissey, associate professor in the Department of History; and Rebecca Stumpf, professor in the Department of Anthropology, all won 2016 University of Illinois Campus Distinguished Promotion Awards. The award, given by the Campus Committee on Promotion and Tenure, identifies scholars whose contributions and achievements within their respective fields are particularly excellent.

September 2016

  • Photo courtesy of Systems Oncology

    Paul Hergenrother, the Kenneth Rinehart Jr. Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry, won the 2017 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society. He also won the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry's UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry.

August 2016

  • John Hummel

    John Hummel of psychology was named a fellow by the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

  • Jòzsef Balogh

    Jozsef Balogh of mathematics won the George Polya Prize in the category of a notable application of combinatorial theory, which is awarded by Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics.

  • Marcus Keller

    Marcus Keller, an associate professor of French and Italian, won the French Republic's Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. It's awarded by the prime minister of France to recognize scholarly contributions to the dissemination of French culture.

  • Vera Hur

    Vera Hur of mathematics won the Simons Fellowship in Mathematics form the Simons Foundation. The fellows program is intended to make leaves more productive by enabling their extension from one academic term to a full academic year.

  • May Berenbaum

    May Berenbaum of entomology received United States Department of Agriculture's Sterling B. Hendricks Memorial Lectureship Award and the Peabody Museum at Yale University's Addison Emery Verrill Medal.

  • Mara Wade

    Mara Wade of Germanic Languages and Literatures received the Newberry Library Chicago's National Endowment for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship.

  • Photo courtesy of Public Address Conference

    Communication Assistant Professor J. David Cisneros received the 2016 Early Career Award, given by the National Communication Association's Rhetorical & Communication Theory Division

  • Joaquín Rodríguez-López of chemistry won the Electrochemical Society Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship to advance his work in advancing green energy technology.

  • Cara Finnegan

    Communication Professor Cara Finnegan received the National Communication Association's 2016 James A. Winans and Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address for her book, "Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression," (Illinois Press, 2015).

  • Marshall Scott Poole

    Communication Professor Marshall Scott Poole received the 2016 Lifetime Service Award given by the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management. It recognizes him for cumulative research and service to the disciplines of Organizational Communication and Management Information Systems.

  • Statistics Professor Peiyong Annie Qu has been named a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). She received the award for her influential contributions to estimating equations, semiparametric inference on correlated data, and for her outstanding service to the profession.

  • John Caughlin

    Communication Professor John Caughlin has been recognized with the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) Mentoring Award. The IARR is an interdisciplinary organization that strives to promote advances in the scientific study of personal and social relationships.

June 2016

  • Martin F. Manalansan IV

    Martin F. Manalansan IV, associate professor of Asian American Studies and Anthropology, has been awarded the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award by the Minority Scholars' Committee of the American Studies Association. It recognizes a scholar who demonstrates dedication to and excellence in mentoring underrepresented faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and/or college, university or high-school students.

May 2016

  • Gene Robinson

    Gene Robinson of entomology won the International Behavioral and Neural Genetics Society's Distinguished Investigator Award for the importance of his research discoveries and record of achievement in the area of behavioral and neural genetics.

  • Huimin Zhao

    Huimin Zhao, the Steven L. Miller Chair in Chemical Engineering, won the Charles Thom Award from the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology. It's given to individuals who have made outstanding research contributions in industrial microbiology and/or biotechnology.

  • Jeffrey Moore

    Jeffrey Moore, the Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry, was awarded the American Chemical Society Edward Leete Award. He also won the Institution of Chemical Engineers' Oil and Gas Award.

  • Fritz Drasgow

    Fritz Drasgow, a professor of psychology and the dean of the School of Labor and Employment Relations, won the 2016 Distinguished Career Award from the Academy of Management (AOM). The award is given to scholars with a clear record of excellence.

  • Jeffrey Moore

    Jeffrey Moore, the Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry, was awarded the American Chemical Society Edward Leete Award. He also won the Institution of Chemical Engineers' Oil and Gas Award.

  • Kenneth Suslick

    Kenneth Suslick, the Marvin T. Schmidt Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, won the Chemistry Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Senior Scientist Mentor Award for emeritus faculty who maintain active research programs with undergraduates in the chemical sciences.