Illinois Featured Content

U. of I. researchers are working with Boeing to develop truly renewable energy solutions for aviation from well to wake - from processing raw materials into fuel, to measuring the emissions in the wake of an aircraft. 

'Due to wind patterns, much of the impact of wildfire smoke exposure occurs far from the fires themselves... Many areas of the Midwest have more annual days of smoke exposure than they experience in California.'

An ambitious project led by computer science professor Elahe Soltanaghai has secured $2 million in funding to develop a UAS-mounted canopy-penetrating radar tag system for understory fuel sensing.

Gully erosion is the most severe form of soil erosion, and it can seriously impact agricultural fields, contributing to sediment loss and nutrient runoff into waterways. 

Kanter excelled at 'taking students into a natural place and just having them experience it,' says Jonathan Tomkin, head of the Environmental Sustainability program. 'That’s where the deepest learning happens—when they’re immersed.' 

Inside a large walk-in refrigerator on the Illinois campus, thousands of envelopes hold the fate of global food security, not to mention a significant portion of the world’s economy. It's the country’s only public soybean seed bank.

In a review in the journal Science, Illinois researchers describe the many field- and laboratory-tested approaches to increasing crop resilience in a warming world.

The projected losses for U.S. agriculture are especially steep. 'Places in the Midwest that are really well suited for present day corn and soybean production just get hammered under a high warming future.'

The 2025 Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement were recently awarded to faculty, staff and students who address critical societal issues.

The Speech Accessibility Project, based at the University of Illinois, has been named to the first-ever Forbes Accessibility 100 list.

The House-passed reconciliation bill and current version of the Senate bill, ends funding nationwide for SNAP-Ed, including all programs administered through University of Illinois Extension.

Midwest plant ecology specialists recently published a database of thousands of plant species found in historic prairies — and that’s just one part of their comprehensive investigation of Midwest plant biodiversity.  

U. of I. researchers propose policies that would reward farmers for adopting 'climate-smart' practices when growing biofuel crops and remove the hurdles that currently thwart such efforts. 

U. of I. alumna Marla Dickerson and her team were recognized with the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series on the international trade in the chemicals used to make fentanyl. Dickerson is the 26th alum to ever win a Pulitzer.

"The look on their faces when I asked that really stuck with me. ‘How can you even be asking about leisure when everything else is going on, when my family lives on the front lines, when I’m separated from my children?’”