Every one of the nearly 650 faculty members in the College of LAS conducts research. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is an R1 research university and our faculty members are integral part of the campus' research activity.
Research
Our faculty members are leading their fields and generating new knowledge thanks to cutting-edge research in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. They earned $69.2 million in grant funding during the 2016-17 school year. They're also contributing to the campus' interdisciplinary research institutes:
- 79 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
- 89 at the Carl R. Woese Institute of Genomic Biology
- 27 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
- 6 at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
- 13 at the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment
LAS faculty members have been honored for their excellence in research with the National Medal of Science, Guggenheim Fellowships, and memberships to the National Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They've also won prestigious funding as Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators and recipients of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.
The college prides itself on an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment that allows broader thought and inventive ideas in all three of its main research areas.
Mathematical, life, and physical sciences
In these areas, researchers are building on the foundations of mathematical and scientific knowledge. They're applying it to topics like mathematics, statistics, actuarial science, geography, geology, and several different kinds of biology. In the 2017-18 school year, LAS researchers received $36.7 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, more than 50 percent of the campus total. The University of Illinois received about $610 million total in grant funding from the National Science Foundation.
Humanities
In LAS' humanities units, faculty members are exploring people, the challenges they encounter, and how they respond through literature, writing and the human experience. In the last two school years, six LAS faculty members have received NEH Fellowships. The fellowship program supports advanced research in the humanities, and the recipients produce articles, books, digital materials or other scholarly resources. During three of the last four years, Illinois has garnered more fellowship awards than any other single institution.
Social sciences
Faculty members are studying society, relationships, and human behaviors. They're shattering longstanding myths about how humans interact and providing new guidance about how we learn and process the world around us. They work together through research centers like the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Initiative in order to tackle global challenges.
Undergraduates are encouraged to design their careers by researching alongside our faculty members.
Many graduate students conduct research, publish papers, and write theses and dissertations while studying at the University of Illinois.
Hear from some of the college’s most distinguished members.
Need more information? Visit the Research at Illinois website.
