News Bureau

As part of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s COVID-19 precautions for the fall semester, all faculty members, staff and students who participate in on-campus activities will be required to be tested at on-campus sites twice a week.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Robert Jones will join campus experts to discuss modeling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Illinois – at the state and campus levels – during an event Thursday. 

Seven University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been named Center for Advanced Study Professors, one of the highest forms of campus recognition.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will introduce a series of measures designed to enhance its support of research on issues of systemic racism in the U.S. The initial component is the Chancellor’s Research Program to Address Racism and Social Injustice, which will seek proposals early in the fall semester.

A Black Arts Initiative by the College of Fine and Applied Arts kicks off this week with a series of conversations with Black artists.

The NFL team in the nation’s capital will no longer be the Redskins. It’s the highest-profile retirement of an American Indian name by a sports team in decades, says Jay Rosenstein, an Illinois professor of media and cinema studies. His documentary on the use of American Indian mascots in sports aired in 1997 and he has closely followed the issue since.

A coronavirus-abbreviated Major League Baseball season will open amid the backdrop of significant labor tension between owners and players, says U. of I. labor historian Daniel A. Gilbert.

The 2020 Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement recognize outstanding individual and group outreach efforts.

Leanne Knobloch and Angharad Valdivia, both professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have been elected Fellows of the International Communication Association, in recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication. Two other Illinois faculty members received the same honor last year.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students, faculty members and staff are invited to sign a voluntary pledge that reinforces the need for COVID-19-responsible behaviors.

News media interested in learning more about the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s COVID-19 testing are invited to a one-time media availability Tuesday, July 7 at 10 a.m. near the Alice Campbell Alumni Center 601 S. Lincoln Ave., Urbana.

Eight University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign projects are among 26 to receive the first C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute awards for artificial intelligence techniques to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. The institute will provide a total of $5.4 million over the next year to projects that examine the medical, social and economic impacts of the novel coronavirus and inspire researcher collaboration in advanced machine learning and other AI disciplines. 

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its favor, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program remains a stopgap measure at best. The permanent fix is a comprehensive immigration bill that looks something like the former DREAM Act, says Lauren R. Aronson, an associate clinical professor of law and the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the U. of I. College of Law.

At least one familiar brand is being retired and others are getting a rethink due to their use of Black images. Illinois advertising professor Jason Chambers explains why.

Students applying for fall 2021 freshman admission to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will not be required to submit SAT or ACT test results due to the COVID-19 pandemic limiting students’ opportunities to take the exams.

Four University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members were honored by the Office of the Provost with the Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will open the fall semester with as much in-person instruction and residential occupancy as COVID-19 precautions allow.

Pandemics have changed our physical spaces throughout history, but changes made as a result of COVID-19 may not be long-lasting, says Illinois architecture professor Benjamin Bross.

Police reform is on the national agenda in response to the choking death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in late May – and many other such incidents before and since. Police Training Institute director Michael Schlosser weighed in on the current crisis. Based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the PTI trains dozens of police departments across the state of Illinois. Schlosser spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates.

Alice Cary, currently the chief of police at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s next executive director of public safety and chief of police.

Four students at the University of Illinois were selected to study languages in world regions critical to U.S. interests as recipients of David L. Boren Scholarships.

Calls for defunding or even abolishing the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death may sound radical to many, but the idea is not new, says A. Naomi Paik, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Humanities Research Institute – previously known as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities – is now one of nine campuswide interdisciplinary research institutes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Four University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members were honored by the Office of the Provost with the Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership.

Fourteen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students and recent alumni were offered Fulbright grants to pursue international education, research and teaching experiences across the globe this coming year.

Our biases, conscious and unconscious, influence how we process news of events like the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, and the media plays an important part in forming and reinforcing those biases, says Travis Dixon, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Since its inception in 1992, the Faculty and Staff Emergency Fund has helped more than 1,000 academic professionals, faculty members and staff.

Experts from a variety of fields at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are available to the news media to discuss COVID-19-related topics.

Two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students were named Udall Scholars, a first for the university in the same year. A total of 55 Udall scholarships were awarded this year.

Summer is normally a season for blockbusters, but movie theaters will have special challenges this year, starting with a gamble on a few July releases. Derek Long, a professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looks at the present and future of the business.

The University Archives is collecting personal reflections to document campus life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faculty and staff members and graduate teaching assistants this spring were honored with Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction. The awards recognize excellence in teaching, mentoring and advising.

The continued spread of COVID-19 ought to prompt adults to start seriously thinking about end-of-life issues such as writing a will, said University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor and elder law expert Richard L. Kaplan.

The Supreme Court’s livestream of its oral arguments is likely a temporary measure due to COVID-19, said Jason Mazzone, the Albert E. Jenner Jr. Professor of Law and the director of the Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law at the College of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has canceled on-campus summer events through July 5. 

Use of online technology at the University of Illinois has skyrocketed since mid-March. It is allowing Illinois faculty members and staff to keep doing their work and stay connected with students.

Health authorities believe COVID-19 spreads by the transmission of respiratory droplets, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends homemade cloth face coverings for use in public spaces. Starting today, Illinois joins many other states in requiring people to wear masks while out. However, initial uncertainty regarding the masks’ effectiveness in reducing exhaled droplets leaves some people unsure or skeptical of their usefulness during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Mechanical science and engineering professor Taher Saif spoke with News Bureau physical sciences editor Lois Yoksoulian about a study that he and his graduate students, Onur Aydin and Bashar Emon, performed on the effectiveness of common household fabrics for use in homemade masks.

Many businesses are closed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and some building managers have shut off water and air conditioning to conserve resources. Unfortunately, warmth and lack of clean water flow can contribute to the growth of potentially dangerous microbes, including the bacteria that contribute to Legionnaires’ disease. Illinois Sustainable Technology Center chemist and industrial water treatment specialist Jeremy Overmann spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about the problem and potential solutions.

Most households struggle financially for two to five years before filing for bankruptcy, making a pandemic-related surge in consumer bankruptcy filings unlikely, said University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor Robert M. Lawless, a leading consumer credit and bankruptcy expert.

Physicist Alan Nathan and student Charlie Young team up to explore the evolving world of baseball physics and analytics in a new 30-minute documentary on the Big Ten Network. “Runs and Data: The Science of Illinois Baseball” premieres May 4.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sarita V. Adve and physics professor Philip W. Phillips have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honor societies in the nation.

Horseshoe bats in China are a natural wildlife reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses. Some health experts think wildlife markets – specifically in Wuhan, China – led to the spillover of the new coronavirus into human populations. Though not confirmed, the hypothesis has given bats around the world a bad rap, and public fears of exposure to bats are on the rise. Illinois Natural History Survey wildlife biologist Tara Hohoff, the project coordinator of the Illinois Bat Conservation Program, spoke to News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about bat biology and conservation, and the flying mammals’ role in human health.

Pandemics of the past are getting new attention, among them the plague of the 14th century. Known as the Black Death, it was medieval, European, bubonic and spread by rats – at least that’s what most of us think. Much of that needs adjustment, however, in large part due to discoveries of the past decade, says Carol Symes, a professor of medieval history at Illinois.

A new relief fund, Illinois CARES: COVID-19 Emergency Support Fund, will assist University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students dealing with financial challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. All students can request emergency funding beginning immediately.

There’s a long history of scapegoating marginalized people in epidemics, and of seeing difference in the way those of different races respond to disease, says Rana Hogarth, a U. of I. professor who studies the history of both medicine and race, and the connections between.

Eunice E. Santos, the dean of the School of Information Sciences, studies how computational models can help explain social behaviors and the factors that influence decision-making during pandemics.

Illinois professors Janice N. Harrington, English, and David Sepkoski, history, received 2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign juniors Sriyankari Chitti and William Lyon were awarded Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for their potential to contribute to the advancement of research in the natural sciences, mathematics or engineering.

Dolores Albarracín, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent much of her career studying how people respond to public health messages asking them to change their behavior. She speaks about the special challenges of the present moment.

A key message coming through about COVID-19 is that older folks face much greater danger, but what does that suggest to the young? Cabral Bigman, a communication professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, talks about the challenge of “social comparison frames” in an epidemic.