Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Illinois professor to speak to congressional staffers about generational change

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois professor Julie Dowling will bring her expertise to Washington, D.C., and an audience of congressional staffers on Monday – part of a live-streamed briefing on “How the Millennial Generation is Reshaping America.”

A professor of Latina/Latino studies, Dowling will be one of two presenters at the afternoon briefing. The event, sponsored by the Population Association of America, will be held in the Rayburn House Office Building.

Dowling will discuss her own and others’ research on shifts in racial/ethnic identity and demographics in the U.S. She also will address the upcoming 2020 census, including concerns about its question on race and ethnicity and the proposed citizenship question.

The event will be livestreamed at 1 p.m. CDT on Twitter and Facebook, then available on the PAA website afterwards.

Dowling is in her fourth year on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations. In her 2014 book “Mexican Americans and the Question of Race,” she wrote about the ways that people respond to race and ethnicity questions on the census.

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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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