CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Five University of Illinois professors at the Urbana-Champaign campus have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.
The scholars program recognizes faculty excellence and provides $15,000 to each scholar for three years to enhance their academic careers. The money may be used for travel, equipment, research assistants, books or other purposes.
“The University Scholars program celebrates the remarkable achievements of the named individuals,” said Nicholas Jones, the University of Illinois System’s executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs. “Our faculty represent the strong foundation of the world-class academic experience that contributes to the betterment of society and draws students and researchers to the U. of I. System universities from across the globe. The University Scholars are exemplars of that faculty excellence.
“When you consider the diversity of scholarship across all three of our universities and the standards of academic excellence that we nurture and grow through our recruitment of esteemed educators and researchers, all of our University Scholar recipients should be deservedly proud of the honor.”
The five Urbana campus recipients, as described by their nominators:
Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, a professor of food science and human nutrition, is actively involved in the Cancer Center at Illinois. She served as a health innovation professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and is an active member of the Center for Genomic Diagnostics at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
Her research has revealed cellular adaptations and molecular mechanisms that underlie the detrimental effects of specific lipids, free fatty acids and obesity in the aggressiveness of breast cancers. She published 65 papers, delivered more than 30 invited lectures and received a prestigious publishing award. She served as editor-in-chief for two endocrine-focused journals. Madak-Erdogan has been an investigator on grants totaling approximately $8 million. She was recognized as an Emerging Leader of the National Academy of Medicine and is a Big Ten Alliance Academic Leaders Program Fellow.
Much of her scholarly activity aligns with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She created a course on health disparities in the U.S. and organized a mini symposium on “Hormone Dependent Cancer Disparities.” She also serves as the inaugural co-lead of an Illinois Minority Serving Institutions Alliance working group, with a goal of producing underrepresented doctoral recipients by providing unique and targeted opportunities to enhance their preparation for a successful career in academia and beyond.
History professor Robert Morrissey has established a national and international reputation that places him alongside major scholars in the highly competitive field of early American history. In addition to being designated a Helen Corley Petit Scholar and earning a 2016 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award, he was named a Conrad Humanities Professorial Scholar in 2016 and was chosen as the Mellon-Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities in 2018.
Since earning tenure in 2016, he has published nine articles and book chapters including the introduction of a volume he coedited, an article on Native Americans in the “Cambridge History of the American Revolution,” and an article on the French Midwest in the “Oxford Handbook of Midwestern History.” Morrissey advised and helped publish an online student-edited book of undergraduate writing in “Environmental Humanities, Defining Environments: Critical Studies in the Natural World” and edited an online interdisciplinary publication, “Flatland: New Directions in Environmental Humanities.”
Morrissey has been on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students almost every semester and received the department’s George and Gladys Queen Excellence in Teaching Award. His successes as a mentor for environmental humanities projects, senior theses and honors projects were recognized in 2020 when he received the Undergraduate Mentor of the Year award from the Campus Honors Program for his work advising James Scholars.
In 2020, he helped launch a new collaborative partnership around art history and practice among Illinois-descended tribal communities. In 2021, he received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation through the Humanities Without Walls Consortium for the project, “Reclaiming Stories,” which provides an opportunity for community members and tribal artists and cultural officers to travel to Europe to reconnect with 18th-century animal hide paintings in museum collections there.
Professor of chemistry Joaquín Rodríguez-López has taught undergraduate and graduate lecture courses, appearing five times on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students and receiving the 2023 School of Chemical Sciences Teaching Award. He has been outstanding as a research advisor, mentoring 30 graduate students, 10 postdocs, nine visiting graduate students, three master’s students, and 28 undergraduate students. Eleven of these undergraduates have been co-authors on research publications.
Rodríguez-López created “The Electrochemistry Bootcamp,” which combines laboratory and classroom instruction on the basics of electrochemistry for a three-day immersive experience for young scientists from all over the world.
In his 11 years of service at Illinois, Rodríguez-López has won 20 distinctions, fellowships and awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Arthur F. Findeis Award from the American Chemical Society, Division of Analytical Chemistry, and the Zhaowu Tian Prize for Energy Electrochemistry. He has published over 115 papers and has delivered over 130 invited talks at major conferences and universities around the world.
His research with scanning electrochemical microscopy and lasers will help build better batteries and his efforts in energy storage made him a leader within the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a $200 million initiative of the Department of Energy.
Law professor Jacob Sherkow focuses on intellectual property and medical therapies, agency regulation and the legal and ethical issues attendant to advanced biotechnologies. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 articles and essays, two books on COVID-19 innovation policy, four book chapters and many op-eds. His work explores how the structuring of property and regulatory regimes can produce the best medicines for the most people.
Sherkow often uses case studies to reveal situations where underlying scientific practice is misaligned with legal rules or the realities of litigation. He has explored these disconnects in areas such as patent law and irreproducible data; laboratory practice and inventorship surrounding genome editing techniques like CRISPR; medical device safety and follow-on technologies; and, recently, the science behind antibody generation and its mismatch with several doctrines in patent law. His recent work was funded through a grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore legal improvements to new genomic privacy and security technologies developed at Illinois.
Sherkow holds faculty appointments at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the European Union Center. He has also advised major scientific organizations on bioethical issues, including the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community and the New York Genome Center.
In 2018, Sherkow was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine Scholar, and currently serves as an academic advisor to the academy’s Committee on Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation. He routinely advises governments and commercial entities on a variety of issues related to patents and biotechnology. He has counseled dozens of investment firms about patent litigation, engaged with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on patent challenges on pharmaceuticals, worked with the World Health Organization on the intellectual property rules covering viral genomes, advised a committee of the French National Assembly on issues relating to the patenting of biotechnological tools, and served as an expert in patent cases in the U.S. and Europe.
He is an accomplished teacher, frequently earning a place on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. He serves on the editorial board of CRISPR Journal and provides peer reviews for many additional journals. At the College of Law, he directs the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program and serves as the faculty advisor to the Journal of Law, Technology & Policy.
Hanghang Tong, a professor of computer science, conducts highly influential research focused on large-scale data mining and machine learning, especially for graph and multimedia data. His work has theoretic and applicable impact, solving real-world problems from high-impact application domains where graph mining often plays a fundamental role, such as social networks, bioinformatics, security and e-commerce. He has made significant and influential contributions to the field of graph mining with long-lasting impacts and has established himself as a leader in this field.
He has published more than 200 refereed papers and four books. For his conference papers, he has received multiple awards. In 2020, academic researcher network database provider AMiner awarded him a Most Influential Scholar Award honorable mention in the field of data mining. Tong has raised more than $71 million during his career, with more than $30 million at Illinois.
To date, Tong has helped graduate six doctoral students, nine master’s students, and mentored two postdoctoral researchers. He has included 13 undergraduate students in his research group and has mentored multiple high school students about careers in computer science and engineering. He routinely teaches graduate- and undergraduate-level classes on topics including pattern recognition, big data analytics, web mining, statistical machine learning, data structure and algorithms and network mining.