Welcome to the inaugural issue of the LAS Faculty Research Bulletin. As Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I am privileged throughout the year to witness, encourage, and celebrate the full breadth of LAS faculty research achievements. In the face of the unprecedented challenges of the last several years, our faculty have persevered and continued to excel in their scholarship and research fields. Whether we measure that excellence by grants, published papers, or national honors and awards, LAS faculty are truly extraordinary.
We are proud to highlight the following outstanding examples of research excellence. By the time this is in your inbox, there will surely be more grants, articles, books, and awards to announce. Still, we hope that this inaugural bulletin imparts some sense of the amazing breadth of achievement and depth of excellent work by LAS faculty. On that note, we encourage you to join us at the second of our two faculty research symposia on April 13, Migration in a World of Walls and Borders, featuring many UIC faculty presenters, invited scholars, and MacArthur Fellowship-winning author Valeria Luiselli as the keynote speaker.
Lisa A. Freeman, Interim Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
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Associate Professor Max Berkelhammer of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences is the principal investigator of the UIC component of a $5M Department of Energy grant for the Community Research On Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) Urban Integrated Field Laboratory. This is a community-driven scientific effort to understand the interactions between cities and climate with Ralph Cintron (ENG/ LALS) and Miquel Gonzalez-Meler (BIOS) also serving as Co-PIs.
Led by Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with a large team of scientific, educational and community organizations, CROCUS will leverage extensive existing observational and modeling capabilities to unravel the effects of local and regional climate processes on communities. Conversely, the project will seek to better understand how urban systems affect their regional climate. The work seeks to empower and actively involve diverse communities to enable just, long-term societal benefits from climate mitigation and adaptation, such as reducing emissions and adapting neighborhoods to address future effects of climate change. Read More
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Associate Professor Ying Hu of the Department of Chemistry has received a $1.9M grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health to advance his work in ultrasensitive quantification of cytokine release from T cells. Cytokines
are signaling proteins essential to the activity of immune cells and thus play a role in disease response and wound healing, such as how our bodies respond to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Professor Hu will use the grant to support his development of novel ultrasensitive cytokine quantification techniques.
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Assistant Professor Rebecca Littman of the Department of Psychology has received a $400K award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project, “Asking About Violence: Improving Ethics in Violence Research.” This project investigates and aims ultimately to mitigate the negative impacts of violence studies on research participants and staff. The project will consist of a thorough assessment of the available research on inquiring about violence, a multi-site field experiment with various groups at risk for political violence, and a survey of interviewers who consistently inquire about respondents’ experiences with violence. The findings will be utilized to create a best practices manual and a training module for graduate students on the ethical issues involved in such research.
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Professor Thomas Park of the Department of Biological Sciences has been awarded a $1.5M National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his work in the neurobiology of hypoxia tolerance in the naked mole-rat. Naked mole-rats dwell in vast subterranean colonies where several animals share the same stale air, making their brains particularly tolerant to low oxygen levels. This project will use a combination of physiological, biochemical, and genetic techniques, such as mass spectrometry and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), to understand the factors that contribute to this tolerance, which may provide crucial insight into how the human brain can survive oxygen deprivation, for instance during a heart attack. Co-PIs include Stephanie Cologna (CHEM) and Liang-Wei Gong (BIOS).
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Professor Lev Reyzin of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (MSCS) is PI on a $10M, five-year NSF grant to establish a new data science institute: the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms and Learning (IDEAL). UIC is the lead institution for this grant in partnership with the Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. MSCS Professors Will Perkins and Yichao Wu are the UIC co-PIs.
The institute will include 55 faculty members from the five institutions (including MSCS faculty Yu Cheng, James Freitag, Marcus Michelen, Gyuri Turan, and Ping-Shou Zhong) in addition to nine researchers from Google. IDEAL will support work focused on three themes: foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society.
Computer science, electrical engineering, probability, and statistics are among the core disciplines represented in the project. UIC students will benefit from the project through access to research assistantships, postdoctoral fellowships, cross-institutional courses, workshops, and seminars. Read More
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Professor Tarini Bedi of the Department of Anthropology won a 2022 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from The Society for Humanistic Anthropology at this year's American Anthropological Association meeting for her book, Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobiles in India (University of Washington Press, 2022). The annual juried book competition honors elegant, accessible ethnographic writing that contributes to the discipline of anthropology in innovative and interesting ways.
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Associate Professor Manoucheka Celeste of the Gender and Women's Studies Program has been awarded a 2022 APEX Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) for her co-authored article “Prying the Doors Open: Women of Color Mentoring in the Field of Communication,” which appeared in Communication, Culture and Critique in 2021.
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Ruixuan Gao, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biological Sciences, has been named a 2022 Searle Scholar for his early-career research of biological ultrastructures. Professor Gao is the second UIC scholar to receive this high honor, which supports ground-breaking research in chemistry and the biomedical sciences. The award provides $300,000 over three years for Professor Gao’s work aimed at nanometer-scale molecular imaging of minute biological structures. His work seeks to answer critical questions associated with the replication of enveloped viruses and aims to aid in the discovery of potential therapeutic strategies for viruses like HIV and SARSCoV-2. Read More
Professor Gao is also one of three researchers recently selected to receive the 2022 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. This award supports novel approaches to manipulating and analyzing brain function. Professor Gao was awarded the 2-year $200,000 grant based on his project’s “ability to fundamentally change the way neuroscience research is conducted.” . Read More
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Professors Dhruv Mubayi and Daniel Groves from the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science (MSCS) each have been awarded a Simons Fellowship for Mathematics. The Simons Foundation is the premier foundation promoting research in mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer science by sponsoring individuals, institutions, and science infrastructure. These Simons Fellowships are highly competitive awards that provide funds for a semester-long research leave. Recipients are chosen based on their scientific achievements and the potential impact of their work.
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Professor Nadine Naber of the Global Asian Studies Program, the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, and affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, is the recipient of the American Studies Association’s (ASA) 2022 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize. This prize recognizes the outstanding achievement of an individual who has dedicated a lifetime of work to the mission and values of American studies. Professor Naber was honored at an awards ceremony during the ASA’s annual meeting in November 2022.
Professor Naber’s research explores the impact of racism, classism, heterosexism, and U.S.-led imperialism on Arab and Arab-American communities and investigates the potential for feminists of color to lead social movements to create a world without oppression. Read More
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Beth Richie, Head of the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and Professor in Black Studies, has been selected as a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar, a very select group of academics working toward racial and economic justice. This award provides $250,000 to each recipient to support their research and activism.
Professor Richie, who is the second LAS faculty member to receive this award, has devoted four decades of scholarly and activist work to the ways in which race, ethnicity, and social position influence the experience of violence and criminalization, especially by Black women and gender non-conforming individuals. Read more.
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Brooke Shipley, Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, was awarded the London Math Society's 2022 Senior Berwick Prize for her paper with John Greenlees (University of Warwick), “An Algebraic Model for Rational Torus-equivariant Spectra” published in the Journal of Topology in 2018. Their paper is recognized as a fundamental breakthrough in equivariant stable homotopy theory.
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Associate Professor of History Elizabeth Todd-Breland was appointed as a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history.
Professor Todd-Breland’s research focuses on 20th-century US urban and social history, African American history, the history of education and educational policy, racial and economic injustice, urban public policy, community development, and civic participation. Read More
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Office of the Dean
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
University of Illinois Chicago
601 S. Morgan (MC 228)
Chicago, IL 60607
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