News Bureau

The UP Center, in collaboration with the University YMCA’s Art @ the Y program, is hosting the exhibit “Queering UP the Arts: Celebration of Queer Artists and Artworks,”  on display through May 13 in the University Y’s Murphy Gallery. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The gallery, located at 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, is open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The exhibition includes submissions from adult and youth artists from Champaign, Urbana, Mahomet, Saybrook and Bloomington. The artworks are of various mediums including digital prints, photographs, cyanotypes, spray paint, acrylics and many other types.

Art @ the Y seeks to engage issues of social justice through quality arts programming. The UP Center was founded in 2009 as an organization to advocate for the equality, wellness, advocacy and visibility of the LGBTQ communities in Champaign County.

Champaign and Urbana last year began to offer the community a car-sharing program called Zipcar. The company, which now has about 500 members in the area, allows users to pay for the use of a car only when they need it.

Drivers, start those engines. Millikan and Martynas are ready to roll.

The YWCA at Illinois is seeking nominations for the 31st annual Women’s Leadership Awards.

Prospective nominees are exceptional women who display leadership, initiative, creativity and dedication, and go the extra mile to get involved in programs and activities that benefit the communities in which they live and work. The awards recognize the achievements and contributions of exceptional individuals, organizations and businesses in the greater Champaign-Urbana community who work to advance the mission of the YWCA.

The YWCA will host its 11th annual Race Against Racism on Sept. 27 at the U. of I. Arboretum. Registration is open to anyone older than 10, and participants can choose to run or walk in the 5K event. The event starts at 1 p.m., and the registration fee is $20 for advance registration and $25 on race day.

Xinzhu Yu, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award from the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. 

According to the NIH, the New Innovator Award “supports investigators at each career stage who propose innovative research that, due to their inherent risk, may struggle in the traditional NIH peer-review process despite their transformative potential.” The award provides $2.4 million in funding over the next five years.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jawed Karim, an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-founder of YouTube, a popular video-sharing Web site, will be the speaker at the 136th U. of I. Commencement on May 13 (Sunday). He will speak at the 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. ceremonies at Assembly Hall, 1800 S. First St., Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Like the swallows that migrate annually to a certain mission in California, flocks of budding young music-makers are once again congregating on the University of Illinois campus.

About 90 local schools will welcome award-winning authors and book illustrators as part of the University of Illinois’ 2016 Youth Literature Festival.

The Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana celebrates the artistry of area young people during its spring concert.

A Minute With™... Christine Jenkins teaches in the areas of youth services librarianship, children's and young adult literature and literacy studies

The University YMCA is seeking volunteers in Champaign County to join the 15th annual Dump & Run community recycling event to help divert reusable items from the landfill. Volunteers are needed beginning Aug. 8 and up to Aug. 21 to help collect, sort, price and sell household items at the garage sale on Aug. 20-21. Volunteers at last year’s event were able to divert approximately 27 tons of reusable items from the landfill.

The University YMCA, 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, is launching its “Transforming Lives, Connecting Communities” campaign to support capital renovations to its historic building, programming support and strengthening of its endowment. The public is invited to the campaign kickoff Tuesday, Sept. 25, from 5-7:30 p.m. at Riggs Brewery, 1901 S. High Cross Road, Urbana.

The theme for the YMCA Spring 2017 Friday Forum Lecture Series is the “State of the State.” With many challenges facing the state of Illinois, the lecture series seeks to address state-level issues including the budget impasse’s effects on social services, funding for education, incarceration and more.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Robert J. Jones and Kimberlee K. Kidwell, the dean of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, invite faculty members, staff, students and the public to the dedication of the YingYing Zhang Garden.

John Towns, the deputy chief information officer for research IT, will discuss how to make research better from 11 a.m. to noon Feb. 26 in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Building, Room 1122.

A U.S. poet laureate, best-selling authors and Pulitzer Prize winners are among the writers coming to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for “A Year of Creative Writers.”

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jon Butler, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History and Religious Studies at Yale University, will deliver the 2009 Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture in Religion at the University of Illinois.

A Minute With™... Ravi S. Gajendran, a professor of business administration

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The XTension Chords, an all-male a cappella group that intersperses comedy sketches with vocal arrangements, will kick off a new lunchtime entertainment series, "Picnic at the Plaza 2001," celebrating the new Arcade Plaza Courtyard at the University of Illinois.

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.

World War II French Jewish spy Marthe Cohn will speak in Krannert Center’s Great Hall at 6 p.m. Feb. 13.

Donald J. Wuebbles, the Harry E. Preble Endowed Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Illinois, has been selected as the 2018 Bert Bolin awardee and lecturer of the American Geophysical Union’s Environmental Change section.

Biochemistry professor Nicholas Wu has received a 2021 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. His project aims to understand how antibodies interact with their targets.

Starting in 2023, all police recruits in the state of Illinois must take a Wrongful Conviction Awareness and Avoidance course as part of their training. This course was first developed by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Police Training Institute director Michael Schlosser with leaders of the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield.

The course impresses upon new recruits the importance of carefully gathering and analyzing evidence in investigations and not jumping to conclusions about potential suspects. It offers real-world examples of the harm that accrues from wrongful convictions, including a presentation from an exoneree.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In the trade, they're often called "little" literary magazines.

A Minute With™... political scientist Damarys Canache

Swapping food stamps for food boxes would mean scrapping 'the most successful government program we have going today,' said U. of I. professor Craig Gundersen

A Minute With™... education professor Christopher Lubienski

Receiving the earned income tax credit in installments rather than a lump sum benefitted more than 500 families living in Chicago public housing, U. of I. researcher Karen Kramer's team found in a new study.

Cutting the payroll tax could represent the middle-class tax cut that President Trump campaigned on – although changes would need to go through the legislative process and any economic stimulus likely wouldn’t been seen until after the November 2020 election, said Richard L. Kaplan, an internationally recognized expert on U.S. tax policy and the Guy Raymond Jones Chair in Law at Illinois.

A ruling in favor of college athletes in Johnson v. NCAA could potentially herald the most consequential change in college athletics since the NCAA was formed in 1906, says Michael LeRoy, an expert in labor law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Indexing capital gains to inflation could be a simple fix to stimulate a teetering economy, but several significant implementation hurdles remain, said Richard L. Kaplan, an internationally recognized expert on U.S. tax policy and the Guy Raymond Jones Chair in Law at Illinois.

A Minute With...™ labor expert Robert Bruno

Computer science professor Sheldon H. Jacobson discusses the proposed Department of Homeland Security ban of laptop and tablet computers in the passenger cabins of certain flights.

A Minute With™... Chip Bruce, a professor of library and information science

A Minute With™... Karen Tabb Dina, a professor in the School of Social Work 

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures invites visitors of all ages to the 12th annual WorldFest celebration on Sunday, April 8, from 1-4 p.m. Experience performing arts from around the world and hands-on crafts. Admission is free. The museum is located at 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana. Parking is free in lot D-22 in non-reserved spaces. 

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."

Krannert Art Museum and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts will screen short films addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic to commemorate World AIDS Day.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - As media reports and the court of public opinion have fixed on the fate of Elian Gonzalez, interest in Cuban-U.S. relations has never been greater in recent history.

The $44 million Multimodal Corridor Enhancement project, designed to improve access for all modes of transportation on campus and neighboring areas including Green Street, Armory Avenue, White Street and Wright Street, will begin work in early March. New streetscape improvements, a transit-boarding island on Green Street, reconfigured Illini Union vehicle entrance and parking, all-way pedestrian crossings and protected bicycle lanes are some of the features designed to improve travel links from Campustown to downtowns in Urbana and Champaign. All businesses will be open and reachable throughout the project.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -The work of a cosmopolitan collection of artists will be featured in a new exhibition on view Feb. 8 through March 22 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Variety is said to be the spice of life, but it turns out to be an active ingredient in the learning process as well.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The most brilliant display of fall color to be found this season may be indoors - at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Art Museum.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new exhibition originating at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Art Museum seeks to reintroduce the public to the work of self-taught African-American artists Bill Traylor and William Edmondson by emancipating them from their "outsider" status and placing their art back in the context in which it was first discovered and acknowledged more than a half century ago.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Recent work by six graduates of the master of fine arts program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is on view Friday (July 18) through Aug. 13 at I space, the university's Chicago gallery.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Artwork by four ceramics students in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design has been selected for inclusion in a juried exhibition.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. This country's most comprehensive museum exhibition of early works by Louise Bourgeois is among four new shows opening at the University of Illinois' Krannert Art Museum in the coming weeks.

A Minute With™... educational psychologist Dorothy Espelage, who is an expert on peer aggression, dating violence and school violence