News Bureau

Sport-focused RSO is a Slam Dunk

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If you visit a women’s volleyball practice you might be surprised to see one or two men on the court. There they are, playing against the women, spiking the ball over the net or jumping high to block a shot. These men are practice players, helping the women hone their skills. The men serve as hitters, blockers, motivators or whatever else the team needs.

U. of I. students Alex Tran and Angela Annarino prefer to work in the dark. While their peers are studying, sleeping or unwinding at the end of a long day of class, Tran, from Chicago, Illinois, and Annarino, from Lamont, strap on their work vests and radios. It’s during the night when they are needed the most.

Imagine spending a summer in a place where the summer sun lights the sky for 24 hours, where you can take a long hike on a grand glacier, and where nature’s brilliance greets you at every turn.

If curiosity gets the better of the passersby, and they pause to read the card attached to the brightly colored ceramic hearts or hands, they’ll find that the chimes, called Ben’s Bells, are part of a nationwide grassroots movement for spreading kindness. The bells are gifts for whomever happens upon them, but they come with strings attached: Those who pluck the bells from their perches and take them home are volunteering to spread kindness wherever they go.

Amelia Lee wasn’t sure she wanted to attend the University of Illinois. As a serious oboist, her idea of college was an arts institution such as Oberlin Conservatory or the Manhattan School of Music. Her mother, however, wanted Lee to get a more well-rounded education, and with a top-10 ranked music school, the U. of I. suited them both.

The start date for the smoke-free campus initiative has been postponed from this fall to Jan. 1.

Social Work Ambassadors promote the School of Social Work programs, courses to students curious about the major and the careers available to alumni with degrees in the field.

Students Consulting for Nonprofit Organizations (SCNO) is only 1 year old, yet it already has a worthy list of achievements linked to its name.

For students looking to become the next Nate Silver, or for those who simply like working with numbers but don’t want to become engineers, the U. of I. offers a little-known but highly esteemed major that’s also very much in-demand in the business world.

The U. of I. student body has spoken, and it says it doesn’t want to inhale secondhand smoke anymore.

The year 2015 will mark a milestone for sustainability at Illinois. This fall, a 5.87-megawatt, 20.8-acre solar farm – now under construction on university farmland – will supply about two percent of the campus’s total electricity needs. This project is the result of a dream and a lot of hard work by many stakeholders – not least among them the Illinois students.

Help wanted: On-campus supercomputing behemoth – you know, the place that invented the Web browser – seeks highly motivated student interns to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.

Students participating in the U. of I.’s Study Abroad program say they were thankful for the comprehensive safety training they received on campus before traveling – and more thankful still they never had to employ it in an emergency situation.

This summer, 10 undergraduate students performed research using advanced imaging and microscopy technologies through the Discoveries in Bioimaging Research Experience for Undergraduates.

CubeSat students prepare for launch

World War I began in 1914 n the age of biplanes and the Model T – before even radio, much less the Internet. Yet its effects were massive and are still being felt today.

Jasmine and Jeniece Baines had no interest in Greek life when they stumbled into the Delta Xi Phi sorority. It happened last fall, when the twin sisters from Country Club Hills, near Chicago, visited a cultural fair at the Illini Union.

They show up in rubber boots and load their backpacks with gear: GPS units, latex gloves and data collection notebooks. The other equipment–calipers, syringes, scales and folding tables–will be used later when the students bring turtles here to their temporary laboratory alongside a park road.

U of I team designs “bark park”

The trip that took Bell, Wang and their peers from East Central Illinois to East Asia is part of a new program in the College of Education called the Greater China Initiative, which makes study abroad practicable for undergraduate preservice teachers and provides an opportunity for them to delve into research.

Charles Tucker III, the newly installed vice provost for undergraduate education and innovation, is well aware of the challenges of producing a high-quality undergraduate experience.

In the summer of 2012, two undergraduate students tackled a problem that plant ecology experts had overlooked for 30 years. The students demonstrated that different plant species vary in how they take in carbon dioxide and emit water through stomata, the pores in their leaves. The data boosted the accuracy of mathematical models of carbon and water fluxes through plant leaves by 30 to 60 percent.

At the July 21 meeting of the UI Board of Trustees on the UIC campus, university trustees voted 6-2 to close the Institute of Aviation and end the undergraduate degree program. The institute, which opened in 1945, will likely close its doors at the end of the 2013-14 school year, after all current students have completed the program.

Don’t be fooled by the name, the wildlife and chronic wasting disease research group has a broader mission than you might think. Yes, the research focuses on white-tailed deer, primarily, and on CWD, a baffliing affliction of deer and elk. But for the dozens of undergraduate students who have joined this collaborative effort over the years, the group also is a portal, of sorts, to wide-ranging adventures in research.

It’s been just a year since the Office of the Provost created the Office of Undergraduate Research and students this fall are already seeing tangible results.

Welcome to the virtual lab, a digital re-creation of the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering (NPRE) undergraduate laboratory. The virtual lab is a detailed first-person video game developed to guide freshmen through basic lab setup and procedure, though it soon could provide a training environment for advanced classes in nuclear engineering and beyond.

Have you ever been on the field at Memorial Stadium, standing next to the cheerleaders as they lead an “I-L-L” call-and-response during a football game? Or have you been onstage at Foellinger Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts while world-class musicians play?

With the help of a new interdisciplinary project from students in advertising and computer science, those and a few other quintessential Illinois experiences are just a mouse click – and a pair of virtual reality goggles – away.

Attend a charity fundraiser on the University of Illinois campus, and you might hear one of the many student a cappella groups singing a classic song such as “Blue Skies.” Or you might hear a group at a student event performing a recent Rihanna hit, or singing a blend of Indian and American pop music at the chancellor’s pre-game party on a football Saturday.

Last summer, as most undergraduates spent their vacation traveling to exotic locales or lounging by the pool, one group of students spent their time on campus in an Institute for Genomic Biology lab, reading papers and creating a probiotic pill that could help prevent heart disease."

If that’s not the math you remember from school, that’s no surprise. But that’s the math they practice and preach through the Illinois Geometry Lab, a new math department initiative now in its fourth semester.