Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Deaths

Audrey Hodgins, 87, died July 18 at her home in Urbana. She worked as a technical editor at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Memorials may be made to the Frank Hodgins Fellowship Fund for graduate students in English, University of Illinois Foundation, Harker Hall, 1305 W. Green St., Urbana, IL 61801; to the Urbana Public Library or to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.

Louise Van Buskirk Milroy, 91, died June 6 at the Stewart Health Center in Raleigh, N.C. She worked at the library. A funeral service will be conducted July 23 at 11 a.m. at the Freese Funeral Home, 302 E. Grand Ave., St. Joseph, Ill. The visitation will begin at 10 a.m.

William Gaines, 82, died July 20 in Munster, Ind. He worked as a journalism professor and held the Knight Chair in Journalism, retiring in 2006. He won two Pulitzer Prizes in investigative reporting. A memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. July 24 at Smits Funeral Homes in Dyer, Ind.

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Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

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