News Bureau

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.

Six professors at the University of Illinois have been named 2016 Guggenheim Fellows, bringing to 13 the number of U. of I. faculty members who have been honored with the fellowship over the last three years. This year’s fellows are Dennis Baron, Karin A. Dahmen, Craig Koslofsky, Mei-Po Kwan, Ralph W. Mathisen and Rebecca Stumpf.

The 145th Commencement of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will begin at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, May 14 at Memorial Stadium.

Negotiators reach tentative agreement, and the NTFC will vote Sunday on whether to end its five-day work stoppage. NFTC membership to review and vote on the tentative agreement in the near future.

The final event in a lecture series focusing on undergraduate education will be from 4 to 5:30 p.m. May 5 in the ACES Library Heritage Room. The event will include a conversation to reflect on the year’s four lectures and the issues they raise about undergraduate education on the Urbana campus. The series has been planned and hosted by the Lecture and Discussion Committee of the Campus Conversation on Undergraduate Education. Light refreshments will be served.

Facilities and Services and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment will host an Arbor Day celebration from noon to 1 p.m. April 29, on the Quad near Noyes Laboratory.

Champaign, Ill. – Graduate students Bradford Coyle, Miriam Keep and Phoebe Shelor and undergraduate Daniel Levin have received prestigious Boren Awards for study abroad during 2016-17.

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.

University of Illinois faculty member Rebecca Ginsburg is among a small group of college and university leaders invited to participate in an upcoming roundtable discussion on prison reform at the White House.

Clifton G. Bergeron … Sally Kemp Dawson Buford … Carl S. Coad … Melbourne David "Pete" Eveland … William Hall Christie Maxwell … Burr Nelson … Audrey Louise (Handley) Trees

Memorial Service: Kathryn Avery Cobb Burtness 

The Goodrich Savoy 16 IMAX Theater will show "A Beautiful Planet" daily at 11:30 a.m. April 29-May 5 and host members of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory to introduce the film at a special screening at 11 a.m. May 1. Tickets are on sale now online.

Outstanding individual and group outreach efforts were recognized April 26 with the 2016 Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement. The awards were presented by Interim Chancellor Barbara J. Wilson and Pradeep K. Khanna, the associate chancellor for corporate and international relations, at the I Hotel and Conference Center.

Eight civil service staff employees were honored with the Chancellor's Distinguished Staff Award at a banquet April 25 at the Student Dining and Residential Programs building. The award recognizes exceptional performance.

Faculty and staff members, and graduate teaching assistants at the U. of I. were honored April 26 for excellence in teaching, mentoring and advising. Each was recognized during a reception at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center.

A Minute With...™ Paul Heald, expert in patent, copyright and international intellectual property law

A Minute With...™ Illinois Professor Chris Roegge, executive director of the Council on Teacher Education

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 Provost's Roundtable on Entrepreneurship will host its annual Entrepreneurship Forum from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 28 at the Illini Union.

The Illinois 4-H Robotics Showcase will be 10 a.m.-noon and 1-3 p.m. April 23 at the Activities and Recreation Center, 201 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign.

Anne Balsamo, the dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City, will speak on campus April 22 about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in innovation.

Kimbra Lisa Burris … Gerald L. Fuoss … Danuta Maria Gorecka… Fred Monroe Gottheil … JoAnne Porter … M. Mobin Shorish

Saturday Engineering for Everyone is an open and free lecture series aimed at non-engineers of all backgrounds who are interested in learning about engineering.

Art at the Y presents “Growing Community,” a collection of photographs that document the work of several local community efforts to grow healthy food close to home and to make it accessible to everyone.

Two upcoming workshops organized by the Provost’s Office – one for pre-tenure faculty members and one for midcareer faculty members – will be May 5 at the I Hotel and Conference Center.

Warmer weather in the second week of April brought warmer and drier soils, according to Jennie Atkins, a manager for the Water and Atmospheric Resources Monitoring Program at the Illinois State Water Survey.

A report on honors, awards, appointments and other outstanding achievements of faculty and staff members.

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. 

The U. of I. astronomy department will host its first open house April 23, telling guests to stop by the campus Observatory, 901 S. Mathews Ave., anytime between 1- 5 p.m. and 8-10 p.m.

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.

A Minute With...™ Brant  Houston, expert on investigative journalism and co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network

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.

A Minute With...™ Charles J. Tabb, expert in bankruptcy, contracts and commercial law

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.

A Minute With...™ Theo Malekin, a lecturer in Scandinavian studies

Advancing the University of Illinois educational mission to foster a “culture of discovery” and its commitment to innovative research and scholarship with global impact, Undergraduate Research Week, April 17-23, showcases the best of undergraduate research and creative inquiry at the University of Illinois.

Activities for Earth Week 2016 on the U. of I. campus are being organized by Students for Environmental Concerns. The U. of I. will host several other events leading up to and following the official dates, which are April 18-22.

A report on honors, awards, appointments and other outstanding achievements of faculty and staff members.

Margaret R. Henry … Clarence Lee "Pete" Phillips … Daniel Keith Slack

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.

Thirty-six University of Illinois students have won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, including 31 graduate students and five undergraduates. An additional 52 students were accorded honorable mention.

Six academic professionals were honored with 2016 Chancellor's Academic Professional Excellence awards at a reception April 12.

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.

A Minute With...™ Brian Fields, expert on near-Earth supernovas

Three University of Illinois students have been nationally recognized for their potential to contribute to the advancement of research in the natural sciences, mathematics or engineering.  Two of the students were awarded Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years, and a third earned honorable mention.