News Bureau

The Illinois Neurodiversity Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is accepting applications from neurodiverse students who will be incoming freshmen in the 2023 fall semester.

The “With Illinois” fundraising campaign officially ended June 30 and concluded with a $200,000 personal contribution from Chancellor Robert J. Jones and his wife, Dr. Lynn Hassan Jones.

According to a new commentary in Disability and Health Journal, people with disabilities who rely on service dogs often are prohibited from bringing their working dogs into teaching and research laboratories. This one barrier can stop them from pursuing careers in science, says Joey Ramp, a researcher in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and lead author of the commentary. Ramp spoke about the issue with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates.

The new freshman class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the largest, most academically talented and most diverse in the history of the university.

Five Urbana-Champaign campus professors have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.

The Chancellor’s Commission on Native Imagery: Healing and Reconciliation begins its work today.

Low-income undergraduate students at the U. of I. who need assistance juggling the demands of parenthood and college will be able to get assistance through programs and services offered by the Child Development Laboratory.

Leslie K. Morrow, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center, discusses the impact that a proposed law could have on the curricula and students in Illinois public schools.

The impact of unpredictable state funding on students and postsecondary institutions will be the focus of an upcoming conference at the University of Illinois.

Susan Burton, a nationally recognized advocate for restoring civil and human rights to formerly incarcerated women, will discuss her new book and the challenges of re-entering society after prison at an event Tuesday, May 15,  in Champaign.

College of education faculty member Hua-Hua Chang will receive 2017 E.F. Lindquist Award from the American Educational Research Association and the American College Testing Program at the AERA Awards Luncheon on April 29. The luncheon will take place during the AERA’s annual meeting, April 27-May 1 in San Antonio.

Eight civil service staff employees were honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award at a banquet April 20. The award recognizes exceptional performance.

Seven academic professionals were honored with 2017 Chancellor's Academic Professional Excellence awards at a reception April 6. Now in its 29th year, the program honors the accomplishments and contributions of academic professionals, who provide critical support for administration, research laboratories and educational programs, and offer important outreach programs throughout the state.

University of Illinois physics professor Klaus Schulten, an innovator in the use of computational methods to study the chemical and biological processes driving living cells, died Monday, Oct. 31, at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana. He was 69.

The University of Illinois’ family leave policy was revised recently to remove a teaching requirement for tenure-track faculty members after the birth or adoption of a child.

The dedication of Wassaja Hall began Thursday with the sound of drums and a song sung in Comanche by the OtterTrail drum group, from the Peoria Tribe in Oklahoma. The dedication of the new student residence hall, held in the Student Dining and Residential Program Building due to inclement weather, is a celebration of the legacy of Wassaja, later known as Carlos Montezuma, who in 1884 became the first Native American to graduate from the University of Illinois, said Alma Sealine, the director of University Housing, the first of six speakers at the event.

The chirp of screws being driven into wood and the whirr of drills filled the air in the front room of the old white house at 510 E. Chalmers St. that’s the birthplace of La Casa Cultural Latina and the former home of the U. of I.’s department of Latina/Latino studies.

Art-handling company Terry Dowd Inc. project manager Darren Martin and his work crew are creating a roughly 6 feet by 6 feet panel, part of the “bread” that will be used to make a large art “sandwich.”  The “meat” is a section of lathe, plaster and wallpaper of part of a wall covered with a vivid mural filled with bold depictions of heritage and social justice, of individual and community strength.

“We basically sandwich the walls,” Martin said. “It almost turns it into a crate.”

“You never know what path you’re going on,” said Patty Jones, the associate director for research at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. And, yes, she has gone on many different paths.

The Slavic collection at the U. of I. is the largest in Illinois, the Midwest and any state-supported U.S. university. Jan Adamczyk, a senior library specialist, takes care of the collection and responds to questions about it.  

The number of first-year students expected to report to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus for the upcoming fall semester is similar to the fall 2015 total.

This is the final issue of Inside Illinois, but it’s not the end of the campus news function.

Last week, a flier announcing the May Benefit Choice period was mailed from the state of Illinois Central Management Services, which administers health coverage for state employees. It included information at the bottom of page 5 about the possibility that U. of I. employees would be required to pay retroactive increases to their insurance premiums, depending on the outcome of an ongoing legal dispute pending before the Illinois Labor Relations Board. The potential retroactive costs are unknown at this time and will remain unknown during the Benefit Choice period, during which time employees must select a health plan.

In addition to the main gardens at Allerton Park and Retreat Center, there are 1,500 acres of grounds that have to be maintained, and Nate Beccue manages to do it all by himself.

Expanded polystyrene – more commonly known by its brand name “Styrofoam” – is everywhere. It makes up your disposable coffee cup, the packing peanuts in those care packages to students, and the insulation in your office walls. At Illinois, countless bottles of chemicals, biology specimens and fragile parts of lab equipment arrive in packaging made of Styrofoam every day, and, sadly, almost all of it gets tossed in the trash.

The experiences of eight children from around the world as they learned written language, and the ways in which these students used composition to confront social, societal and pedagogical barriers, are explored in a new book by a University of Illinois scholar.

University of Illinois employees are reminded that if they wish to make changes to their health, dental, state optional life, dependent coverage or re-enroll in the flexible spending plans, these changes must be made using NESSIE, the university’s online self-service benefits application. All changes must be made by midnight May 31 and will be effective July 1.

Multimodal Corridor Enhancement Project transportation improvements are on schedule to begin this fall. The scale of this infrastructure work on key corridors will have significant traffic impacts including detours and street closures during construction. Updated project timelines and associated information will be provided beginning in late summer 2016.

The University of Illinois system appreciates and welcomes the bipartisan effort in Springfield to provide partial, stopgap funding for the state’s public universities, which have been forced to manage through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2016 with no state appropriation.

In need of a classroom for an event or review session? Terry Free, an office manager for the Office of the Registrar, has got you covered.  

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of I. is helping produce movie magic with cinematic scientific visualization.

U. of I. graduate student Anson Woodin (Fred/Petruchio) is on the set April 19 during a rehearsal of "Kiss Me Kate" in the Tryon Festival Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The Lyric Theatre at Illinois production premieres at 7:30 p.m. April 21, with other performances scheduled at 7:30 p.m. April 22 and 23, and at 3 p.m. April 24. 

Giorgi Kvirikashvili, the prime minister of the country of Georgia and a 1998 master’s degree graduate in finance from the University of Illinois, will speak on campus April 27. He will make remarks and take questions at 4:45 p.m. in the Deloitte Auditorium of the Business Instructional Facility, 515 E. Gregory Drive, Champaign. The event is open to the public.

An open letter from Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson and Interim Provost Edward Feser on the strike organized by the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition.

Analysis of a first-ever campuswide survey of recent Illinois graduates provides extensive information on where those students ended up after college. Released today, the Illini Success initiative invited 7,701 bachelor’s degree recipients in 2014-15 from nine Urbana campus academic schools or colleges to participate.

Researchers have uncovered the existence of a dwarf “dark galaxy” lurking nearly 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery was made when a team of researchers, including astronomers at the University of Illinois, using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, noticed subtle distortions in the image of gravitational lens SDP.81. The discovery paves the way to spot many more such objects, which could help astronomers address important questions on the true nature of dark matter.

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has awarded its inaugural 2016-18 IPRH-Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Bio-Humanities and its 2016–17 IPRH-Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowships in Bio-Humanities.

Krannert Art Museum will act on its multiyear commitment to transform galleries and other public spaces by renovating four main-floor galleries this summer. As a result, the museum will close to the public after the final day of its spring semester exhibition calendar, May 15.

When anthrax became a household name in 2011, even curators of some herbaria were unaware that samples of Bacillus anthracis, the source of anthrax, had been housed in their microfungal collections for more than a hundred years. Recently, a digitization project at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the Prairie Research Institute unearthed the whereabouts of historical samples, including one at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

University of Illinois has a history of Fulbright success, ranking as a Top Producer of Fulbright students nationally for the past six years. To capitalize on this momentum, the National and International Scholarships Program is partnering with several campus units to create the first Illinois Fulbright Week, offering a range of programming that both celebrates Illinois’ Fulbright tradition and seeks to continue it by recruiting the next crop of Fulbrighters.

March 2016 was the 10th-warmest March on record with an average temperature of 46.5 degrees, 5.2 degrees above normal.

The Faculty and Staff Emergency Fund is seeking donations to meet its goal of $50,000.

Former University of Illinois police chief Paul Dollins is being remembered as a leader in law enforcement, a community builder and a great friend.

Wendy Mathewson, from left, academic advisor in the history department; Juniper Lawrence, 5; and Dashiel Gaines, 3, view a gingerbread house created by the children's mother, Brianna Lawrence.

Jeff Moore will serve as the interim director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; Paul Ellinger became the new vice provost for budget and resource planning; Katherine Galvin will join the Office of the Chancellor as an associate chancellor.

Coursera, a leading online education company known for massive open online courses, announced March 30 a professional data science master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A student walks by two limestone sculptures on the south side of Foellinger Auditorium earlier this week.

Two things haven’t changed since Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Edward Feser concluded a month of campus budget presentations: The state still doesn’t have a budget, and the university still doesn’t have its annual appropriation.

She just returned from Turkey and is planning a trip to Israel. This is the work life of Brooke Eisenmenger, the director of international advancement.

Sara Pearson, a second-year veterinary student, was among the veterinary students volunteering for the “lamb watch" program in the U. of I.'s College of Veterinary Medicine.

What has become a favorite feature of the annual Engineering Open House is the Tesla Coil Concert, hosted this year on the Bardeen Engineering Quad.