News Bureau

In the fight against disease, many weapons in the medicinal arsenal have been plundered from bacteria themselves. Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, researchers have now uncovered even more potential treasure hidden in silent genes.

The Urbana campus will host two sessions April 11-12 to brief the campus community and the general public on the design update of the campus master plan.

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.

Disinformation, “alternative facts” and the Trump administration’s battle with the mainstream media all will be topics in a panel discussion, “The War on Facts: Costs and Casualties,” April 13 at the University of Illinois.

Three University of Illinois faculty in the College of Fine and Applied Arts have been awarded prestigious academic fellowships in their fields. Anne Burkus-Chasson and Prita Meier have been appointed senior fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and Paul Hardin Kapp has been awarded the 2017 James Marston Fitch Mid-Career Fellowship.

Tom O'Rourke, a professor emeritus of community health at Illinois, has spent much of his professional career examining the nation's health care system. He spoke with News Bureau Life Sciences Editor Diana Yates about the prospects for Obamacare.

Performance artist Autumn Knight will be on campus this month for two performances.

Krannert Art Museum is hosting the first solo museum presentation – “Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal” – by Knight this semester. Knight incorporates elements of theater, dance, psychology and religious studies into her work, which examines with perceptions of race, gender and authority.

University of Illinois professor Erik S. McDuffie is the recipient of a 2017 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Eddie Glaude, a professor of religion and African American Studies of Princeton University, will speak about W.E.B. Du Bois’ views on religion in the annual Marjorie Hall Thulin Lecture in Religion at the University of Illinois.

A study of the DNA in ancient skeletal remains adds to the evidence that indigenous groups living today in southern Alaska and the western coast of British Columbia are descendants of the first humans to make their home in northwest North America more than 10,000 years ago.

Graduate students in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois will present their work at the Master of Fine Arts Exhibition at Krannert Art Museum.

A simple cue can trigger a marked increase in fraud detection among veteran auditors, says a new study co-written by business professors Jessen L. Hobson and Mark Peecher.

The home page for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will turn the calendar back to 1867 on Saturday, with an April Fools' twist.

Krannert Art Museum will host its 25th – and final – Petals & Paintings fundraiser this spring, featuring floral designs created by two dozen florists and inspired by works of art on display at the museum.

Catherine “Katie” Ruth (Hedrick) Dorsey ... William C. Widenor

The last films have been added and the schedule is out for this year’s Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, coming April 19-23 to downtown Champaign.

The new iMSA degree will be for working professionals who want access to quality education from a top-three accounting program with unmatched ties to the accounting field, as well as students new to the accounting profession, said W. Brooke Elliott, the EY Distinguished Professor in Accounting at Illinois.

Graduate students pair powerful images with compelling descriptions of research in the 2017 Image of Research competition.

University of Illinois architecture professor Kathryn Anthony discusses the gender, age and body biases in product, building and fashion design in her new book, “Defined by Design.”

With the demise of the American Health Care Act all but rendering health care reform a moribund issue, tax reform likely will present its own challenges for President Trump and Congress, says Professor Richard L. Kaplan.

Louis Vincent DiBello ... Paul Stanley Hursey ... Jane Knop ... Eugene (Gene) Andrew Schum

University of Illinois students designed a seating area inspired by zen gardens for a major art and design show in Chicago last fall.

The 1979 musical film “Hair” has been added to the schedule for this year’s “Ebertfest,” along with four additional films and directors, actors and other guests who will accompany them.

It was 6 a.m. and the campers were quietly preparing for the day. Suddenly, a voice called out from the camp manager’s tent.

“Girls? We’re going to have to wait. I can see a lion from my window.”

Milestones and relevant connections to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's 150th anniversary. 

Recreation, sport and tourism class creates public service messages about railway safety

Illinois computer science students Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen created an extension for the Chrome web browser to verify articles and pictures posted to Facebook. Even more impressive? They did it in less than 36 hours, as part of a student hackathon event hosted by Princeton University in November 2016.

Have you ever been on the field at Memorial Stadium, standing next to the cheerleaders as they lead an “I-L-L” call-and-response during a football game? Or have you been onstage at Foellinger Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts while world-class musicians play?

With the help of a new interdisciplinary project from students in advertising and computer science, those and a few other quintessential Illinois experiences are just a mouse click – and a pair of virtual reality goggles – away.

Students learn about the past by replaying it, in a different kind of history class.

Students play the role of U.S. House members for a semester and gain insights on process, politics and power.

I'm sitting in a camouflaged blind when the sun breaks the horizon and lights up the southeast Illinois wetland. Hidden by cattails and other vegetation, I watch my breath and note how cold my feet are despite the thick wool socks and insulated waders I’m wearing.

A hundred yards away, ducks – most of them mallards or American green-winged teal – begin to drop from the sky to land on the water along the shore, right near my bait.

Ten U. of I. history professors, staff and students will each make their case for a book that changed everything at the “History Soapbox” on March 30.

A doctoral student found that the vetting process for refugees seeking U.S. admission was long and intense.

With both tourism and casual “hookup” sex on the rise among college-age adults, there’s an urgent need for sexual health campaigns aimed at young female tourists who are sexual risk-takers, University of Illinois scholar Liza Berdychevsky suggests.

With the closing of Altgeld Tower for repairs, the iconic carillon will be limited to machine-controlled announcements of quarter-hour intervals.

Researchers are nebulizing soybean aphids with RNA to speed the process of discovering the function of many mystery genes.

Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert and TV legend Norman Lear are coming to this year’s “Ebertfest,” along with two films, the first announced in this year’s lineup.

Serionix, a startup based on a technology created at the U. of I. and incubated at the EnterpriseWorks accelerator at Illinois, received a $750,000 contract from NASA to fund continued development of filters to remove toxic gases from next-generation spacesuit life-support systems. The same technology is on its way into consumer products expected to launch within the year. 

Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, Public Health and Engineering at Yale University’s School of Management, will present “Adventures in Policy Modeling!” from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 12, in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications auditorium at 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana. A reception will follow in the NCSA atrium.

Vivian Gladis Reid ... Thomas Dale “Tim” Roberts ... Russell E. Winterbottom

“WILDERNESS,” a documentary-theater piece coming to Krannert Center for the Performing Arts later this month, tells the stories of a half-dozen adolescents who are sent to a wilderness-therapy program in the desert to work through the issues that are troubling them.

Princess U II Imoukhuede, a professor of bioengineering, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award for her proposal “qBio+cBio=sBio; Identifying the role of cross-family signaling in angiogenesis.”
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America’s own interests, as well as international pressures, may dictate fewer changes in U.S. commitments overseas than President Trump has suggested, says U. of I. political scientist Stephen Chaudoin.

A new study reveals that African-Americans have measurable differences in the number and type of bacteria that live in the colon – and those differences are related to their higher-than-average colon cancer risk.

The University of Illinois School of Architecture has a new fabrication tool for students to use in building objects they’ve designed. Its industrial robotic arm will allow students in its Detail and Fabrication Program to cut materials at angles and in shapes that they can’t do with the other fabrication tools.

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the U. of I. awarded its annual faculty and graduate student fellowships for the 2017-18 academic year to seven faculty members and seven graduate students. IPRH also announced its inaugural class of New Horizons summer research fellows for 2017. The program supports faculty summer research and pays for an undergraduate research assistant to support the project.

Monarch butterfly declines cannot be attributed merely to declines in milkweed abundance, researchers report.

The University of Illinois Library has launched a digital publishing initiative, the Illinois Open Publishing Network, with its first work – a new English translation of a memoir of Claude Monet. The publishing network is a network of open-access scholarly publications and publishing infrastructure and resources.

Larry Dornhoff ... Willie T. Summerville

 The Illini Union Bookstore at Illinois announces the second installment of its Sesquicentennial Reading Series on Tuesday, March 14 at 4:30 p.m. in the Authors Corner on the second floor of the bookstore, located at 809 S. Wright St., Champaign.