The University of Illinois System is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Illinois consisting of three universities: Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign. Across its three universities, the University of Illinois System enrolls more than 94,000 students. It had an operating budget of $7.18 billion in 2021.
The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the University of Illinois system, UIC is also the largest university in the Chicago metropolitan area, having more than 33,000 students enrolled in 16 colleges. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity."
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public land-grant research university in Champaign, Illinois, and Urbana, Illinois. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was founded in 1867. With over 53,000 students, the University of Illinois is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS), officially classified as City of Chicago School District #299 for funding and districting reasons, in Chicago, Illinois, is the fourth-largest school district in the United States, after New York, Los Angeles, and Miami-Dade County. For the 2020–21 school year, CPS reported overseeing 638 schools, including 476 elementary schools and 162 high schools; of which 513 were district-run, 115 were charter schools, 9 were contract schools and 1 was a SAFE school. The district serves 340,658 students. Chicago Public School students attend a particular school based on their area of residence, except for charter, magnet, and selective enrollment schools.
The University of Illinois College of Medicine offers a four-year program leading to the MD degree at four different sites in Illinois: Chicago, Peoria, Rockford, and formerly Urbana–Champaign. The Urbana–Champaign site stopped accepting new students after Fall 2016 to make room for the newly established Carle Illinois College of Medicine.
A lateral flow test (LFT), is an assay also known as a lateral flow device (LFD), lateral flow immunochromatographic assay, or rapid test. It is a simple device intended to detect the presence of a target substance in a liquid sample without the need for specialized and costly equipment. LFTs are widely used in medical diagnostics in the home, at the point of care, and in the laboratory. For instance, the home pregnancy test is an LFT that detects a specific hormone. These tests are simple and economical and generally show results in around five to thirty minutes. Many lab-based applications increase the sensitivity of simple LFTs by employing additional dedicated equipment. Because the target substance is often a biological antigen, many lateral flow tests are rapid antigen tests.
The Nathan M. Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, or Newmark Lab, located at 205 N. Mathews Avenue in Urbana, Illinois on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, houses the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The Lab was built in 1967, and has been modified and updated a number of times since then. The facility was named after professor and department head Nathan M. Newmark after his death.
The Gies College of Business Instructional Facility (BIF) is a state-of-the-art business facility designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects located on the Champaign campus at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC).
The University of Illinois Laboratory High School, also known as Uni High or just Uni, was established in 1921 and is a laboratory school located on the engineering section of the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, Illinois. Its enrolls about 300 students, spanning five years. The school's alumni include three Nobel laureates and a Pulitzer Prize winner. In 2022, Uni High was named as a top-15 public school in Illinois by Niche and the following year rose to a top-15 public school in the nation. In 2006 and 2008, it was recognized as a "public elite" school by Newsweek because of its students' high scores on the SAT. Before the change in the SAT's format in 2016, the average SAT score was 2045, and now varies from 1400 to 1600. As of 2019, the average SAT was a 1470. The average ACT score is a 32.
The BC Centre for Disease Control is the public health arm for British Columbia's Provincial Health Services Authority.
Clear Labs, Inc. is a private genomics testing company headquartered in San Carlos, California, United States. It offers a fully automated, next-generation sequencing (NGS) platform for turnkey diagnostics, including SARS-CoV-2 genomic characterization and detection of foodborne pathogens such as listeria and salmonella. It can also verify a food's ingredients, its GMO status, or conduct other tests.
Color is a population health technology company which provides genetic tests and analysis directly to patients as well as through employers. The product focuses on genes that indicate risk for heart disease, cancer, and that affect medication response.
The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), part of the University of Illinois System, conducts tech workforce development and applied research and development in Chicago. It is one of 15 Illinois Innovation Network (IIN) hubs, each of which is associated with one or more of the 12 four-year public universities in Illinois. DPI currently operates in office space at 200 South Wacker Drive, with plans to build a dedicated building within The 78, a neighborhood under development in Chicago's South Loop. DPI's stated goal is to attract individuals to Illinois tech careers and to facilitate corporate investment in Illinois, primarily through training and education and through applied research and development.
COVID-19 testing involves analyzing samples to assess the current or past presence of SARS-CoV-2. The two main types of tests detect either the presence of the virus or antibodies produced in response to infection. Molecular tests for viral presence through its molecular components are used to diagnose individual cases and to allow public health authorities to trace and contain outbreaks. Antibody tests instead show whether someone once had the disease. They are less useful for diagnosing current infections because antibodies may not develop for weeks after infection. It is used to assess disease prevalence, which aids the estimation of the infection fatality rate.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. state of Illinois on January 24, 2020, when a woman in Chicago, who had just returned from the pandemic's place of origin in Wuhan, Hubei, China, tested positive for the virus. This was the second case of COVID-19 in the United States during the pandemic. The woman's husband was diagnosed with the disease a few days later, the first known case of human-to-human transmission in the United States. Community transmission was not suspected until March 8, when a case with no connection to other cases or recent travel was confirmed.
Curative Inc. is a health care startup company best known for scaling COVID-19 testing and COVID-19 vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2022, Curative Inc. launched Curative Insurance Company, a new health insurance plan featuring no copays and no deductibles. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with employees throughout the United States, the company was founded in January 2020 by Fred Turner, Isaac Turner, and Vlad Slepnev to create new diagnostic tests for sepsis and to improve outcomes for sepsis patients. In response to an urgent, unmet need for COVID-19 test development and production in the United States, Curative rapidly shifted focus in March 2020. The company's research team developed a new test for SARS-CoV-2 that utilized oral swabs rather than nasopharyngeal swabs. The Curative test was designed with a scalable process and opportunities to reduce healthcare worker exposure risk, and therefore the amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) used. An independent manufacturing and supply chain model was adopted to avoid competing with existing COVID-19 test companies for limited supplies and laboratory capacity.
The COVID-19 lab leak theory, or lab leak hypothesis, is the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, came from a laboratory. This claim is highly controversial; most scientists believe the virus spilled into human populations through natural zoonosis, similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history. Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats, and spread to humans from infected wild animals, functioning as an intermediate host, at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019. Several candidate animal species have been identified as potential intermediate hosts. There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 existed in any laboratory prior to the pandemic, or that any suspicious biosecurity incidents happened in any laboratory.
Janice K. Jackson is an American educator, educational administrator and former schools superintendent. Jackson served as the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, the school district's superintendent position, from December 8, 2017, until June 30, 2021. Prior to her term as superintendent, Jackson was the chief education officer of the district.
COVID-19 rapid antigen tests or RATs, also frequently called COVID-19 lateral flow tests or LFTs, are rapid antigen tests used to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19). They are quick to implement with minimal training, cost a fraction of other forms of COVID-19 testing, and give users a result within 5–30 minutes. RATs have been used in several countries as part of mass testing or population-wide screening approaches. Many RATs can be used for self-testing, in which an individual "collects their own specimen… and interpret[s] their test result themselves".
