News & More

Paul Kenis, Mary Kraft, Richard Masel, Marina Miletic, Debe Williams and Huimin Zhao all were awarded Excellence in Advising Awards from the College of Engineering. Faculty and staff members are nominated by students and then the Advisors List Selection Committee makes the final selection. (3/31/2008)

Daniel Pack recently received a 2008 Xerox Award for Faculty Research in the College of Engineering. The award recognizes accomplishments by assistant or associate professors, and was received by 4 faculty this year. He was cited for "outstanding research contributions on controlled-release drug delivery and the design of polymeric materials for human gene therapy", and for his extensive publication record. (3/13/2008)

Huimin Zhao was one of six faculty members recognized as University Scholars. The program recognizes excellence while helping to identify and retain the university's most talented teachers, scholars and researchers. He was chosen for his contributions to the field of directed evolution and protein engineering and also for his role in modernizing the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering's biomolecular engineering courses and establishing a new biomolecular engineering minor.

Paul Kenis is a member of the University of Illinois' Institute of Genomic Biology interdisciplinary research team designing chimeric polypeptides that are sensitive to redox conditions in cells. They are working to develop genetically encoded redox sensitive biosensors that would use Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). Their report is in the February issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

We are delighted to announce that Mary Kraft is the newest addition to our faculty. Her research interests are in the use of mass spectrometry to analyze and understand the structure and function of biological materials. (7/20/2007)

The self-healing of plastics is the topic of an article published online in Nature Materials. Faculty member Jennifer Lewis is one of authors working in collaboration with other scientists across the University of Illinois.

Kenneth Schweizer's study of the liquid properties of polymer glasses was the subject of a University of Illinois News Bureau and a United Press article.

We are pleased to announce that Nathan Price will be joining our faculty in August 2007 and Charles Schroeder in December 2007. Nathan Price's research interests are in computational and systems biology and Charles Schroeder's research interests are in single molecule biology, biophysics and biomolecular engineering. (4/19/2007)

Paul Kenis will be named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar as of August 2007. This award recognizes extraordinary scholarship and teaching by young faculty members within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

He has also been named a Beckman Center for Advanced Study Fellow. CAS Fellows are untenured University of Illinois faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. (3/23/2007)

Zheng (Richard) Ni, a former graduate student with Richard Masel was a finalist for the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding student inventors. The start-up company Cbana Laboratories at the University's Research Park uses his patents and expertise to improve Homeland Security by inventing better detection methods for explosives and chemical weapons.

The UIUC News Bureau featured the research of Steve Granick, showing a controversial theory about the behavior of water and hydrophobic surfaces to be correct.