Carl Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dedicated to interdisciplinary research. A gift from scientist, businessman, and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman (1900–2004) and his wife Mabel (1900–1989) led to the building of the Institute which opened in 1989. It is one of five institutions which receive support from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation on an ongoing basis. Current research at Beckman involves the areas of molecular engineering, intelligent systems, and imaging science. Researchers in these areas work across traditional academic boundaries in scientific projects that can lead to the development of real-world applications in medicine, industry, electronics, and human health across the lifespan.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) is the largest college of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The college was established in 1913 through the merger of the College of Literature and Arts and the College of Science. The college offers seventy undergraduate majors, as well as master's and Ph.D. programs. As of 2020, there are nearly 12,000 undergraduate students and 2,500 graduate students attending the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The Morrow Plots is an experimental agricultural field at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Named for Professor George E. Morrow, it is the oldest such field in the United States and the second oldest in the world. It was established in 1876 as the first experimental corn field at an American college and continues to be used today, although with three half-acre plots, instead of the original ten. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 23, 1968. The fields are managed by the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences.
Richard H. Herman is a mathematician, currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, who had served as the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2005-2009. He previously served there as Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs since 1998. As provost he garnered support for, and administered, a “faculty excellence” program designed to bring established faculty to the institution. Throughout his administrative tenure, sponsored research at the university increased by more than 50%.
Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as the leader of the Biosystems Design research theme in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses on directed evolution, metabolic engineering, bioinformatics and high throughput technologies.
Gene Ezia Robinson is an American entomologist, Director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and National Academy of Sciences member. He pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior and led the effort to sequence the honey bee genome. On February 10, 2009, his research was famously featured in an episode of The Colbert Report whose eponymous host referred to the honey Dr. Robinson sent him as "pharmaceutical-grade hive jive".
Ravishankar K. Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a specialist in reliable and secure networks and systems.
Lawrence B. Schook was the vice president for research at the University of Illinois. He oversaw the $1 billion research portfolio across all three campuses. A scholar in comparative genomics and the exploitation of genomic diversity to understand traits and disease, Dr. Schook focuses his research on genetic resistance to disease, regenerative medicine, and using genomics to create animal models for biomedical research. He led the international pig genome-sequencing project, which produced a draft of the pig genome allowing researchers to offer insights into diseases that afflict pigs and humans.
Harris A. Lewin, an American biologist, is a professor of evolution and ecology and Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, Lewin won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for his research into cattle genomics. Lewin chairs the working group for the Earth BioGenome Project, a moonshot for biology that aims to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of 10 years. Lewin is a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, first published in 2013.
Nigel David Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. Preivously he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology, and the leader of the Biocomplexity group at Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
Neal J. Cohen is a professor of psychology in the Cognitive Neuroscience division of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is appointed as a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. He is the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories as of 2011. He is also the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois, formed 2014.
Douglas A. Mitchell is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Microbiology and is a faculty member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses on the chemical biology of natural products. He is known mainly for his work on the biosynthetic enzymology of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) and genome-guided natural product discovery.
Stephen Patrick Long is a British-born American environmental plant physiologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences studying how to improve photosynthesis to increase the yield of food and biofuel crops. He is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and visiting professor in Plant Sciences at Lancaster University and at Oxford University, UK. His work, published in Science, proved that photosynthesis can be manipulated to increase plant productivity—an idea once considered the holy grail of plant biology. Long has added to our understanding of the long-term impacts of climate change, such as rising levels of carbon dioxide and ozone on plants. He has briefed former President George W. Bush and the Vatican, as well as Bill Gates and Anne, Princess Royal, on food security and bioenergy.
Jonathan V Sweedler is an American chemist specializing in bioanalytical chemistry, neurochemistry and cell to cell biology and behavior. He is the James R. Eiszner Family Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Additionally, he holds a faculty appointment in the Beckman Institute. He is also an Elected Fellow to the American Chemical Society, for which he is also the society's Editor in Chief for the journal Analytical Chemistry.
Jian Ma is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a faculty member in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department. His lab develops machine learning algorithms to study the structure and function of the human genome and cellular organization and their implications for health and disease. During his Ph.D. and postdoc training, he developed algorithms to reconstruct the ancestral mammalian genome. His research group has recently pioneered a series of new machine learning methods for 3D epigenomics, comparative genomics, spatial genomics, and single-cell analysis. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2011. In 2020, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Computer Science. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He leads an NIH 4D Nucleome Center to develop machine learning algorithms to better understand the cell nucleus. He is the Program Chair for RECOMB 2024.
Elizabeth Anna Ainsworth is an American plant physiologist currently employed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). She also is an adjunct professor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was awarded the 2018 Crop Science Society of America Presidential Award. She is known for her work concerning the effects of specific atmospheric pollutants, including ozone and carbon dioxide, on the productivity of selected major crops such as corn and soybeans.
Donald Richard Ort is an American botanist and biochemist. He is the Robert Emerson Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he works on improving crop productivity and resilience to climate change by redesigning photosynthesis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB).
