Fall 2023 | Vol. 2, Issue 1
FACULTY RESEARCH
BULLETIN
MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN Welcome to the second edition of the LAS Faculty Research Bulletin. We have much to celebrate in faculty grants, awards, and honors since last spring. UIC’s research expenditures have gone up this year, cracking the half-billion mark for the first time; and LAS has more than done its part with research expenditures rising to $42.3 million, a $10.1 million increase from last year. What’s more, the organizations funding our faculty span an impressive breadth of fields, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Mellon Foundation, to name just a few. This breadth of funding reflects the astonishing diversity of LAS faculty research, one of our great strengths as a college and as a university. There are three faculty I would like to recognize here for the honors bestowed on them by the College: Professor Nicholas Doumanis, who joins the Department of History as the Foundation for Hellenic Studies - Illinois Chair in Hellenic Studies; and our LAS Distinguished Professors for this academic year, Maria Krysan of the Department of Sociology and Izzet Coskun of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. LAS is delighted to welcome Professor Doumanis to our College and to trumpet the impressive achievements of our faculty across our many disciplines. Following on the success of the two symposia last spring, LAS will be sponsoring its third LAS Faculty Research Symposium on March 7, 2024 in the Illinois Rooms in SCE. Focused on Drug Discovery and chaired by Professor Wonwha Cho, the symposium will feature an exciting lineup of distinguished researchers from UIC and across the country. As always, by the time you read this, there will already be more faculty accomplishments to celebrate. It is a pleasure to share these accolades and awards with you and to recognize the extraordinary achievements of faculty across a college as diverse, accomplished, and dynamic as LAS. Lisa A. Freeman Dean
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RESEARCH GRANTS Max Berkelhammer, Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is the Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation planning grant for the project, “Building Equitable University-Community Geoscience Research Collaborations onnChicago’s South Side.” Jennifer Brier, Professor in the Department of History and Head of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, Gavin McNicol, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and UIC alumna Erika Allen, co-founder and CEO of the Urban Growers Collective, serve as co-PIs for this grant. This grant will formalize and accelerate a partnership between the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) with the Urban Growers Collective (UGC), a Black and Women-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The goal is to develop a scalable roadmap to address structural and cultural barriers that have historically deteriorated partnerships between community based land stewards and academic earth science communities. Professor Berkelhammer is also Principal Investigator on a $347,157 grant form the National Science Foundation for his project “Dew impacts on ecosystem carbon, energy and water fluxes at continental scale a synthesis across NEON sites” which will investigate the role of dew formation in ecosystems and its potential impacts on climate change. The project will support the development of a new field-based study abroad program on climate and ecosystem resilience in Puerto Rico for up to 36 undergraduate students, recruited primarily from minority-serving institutions. The project will also support an early career female faculty member as PI and train three PhD students and eight high school students. Jennifer Brier, Professor in the Department of History and Head of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, has received a Humanities Without Walls Consortium’s Grand Research Challenge grant for her project, “Listening for the Long Haul: A Living History of Long COVID.” The project joins Long Covid Justice, a community-based organization, and UIC’s History Moves, a public history project led by Professor Brier, to produce a multifaceted, communitycentered history of Long COVID. The project explores how public history can be useful in producing policies that are responsive to individual and community needs in the face of pandemics and mass-disabling events. Richard Cavanaugh, Professor in the Department of Physics, has received a $1,426,606 Department of Energy grant for “Chicagoland Computational Traineeship in High Energy and Particle Physics.” Students who earn graduate degrees in high-energy physics often lack the hands-on training and advanced computer skill set required for future particle physics experiments, in part because the large body of such computational work takes place at national laboratories rather than universities. Taking advantage of our proximity to Argonne and Fermi National Laboratories, this collaboration between the graduate physics programs at UIC and Northern Illinois University will train physics and computer science students in the specific computational tools necessary to advance the particle physics field. Students will have the unique opportunity to train at two important national labs that are among the few sites that conduct such computational work and will take part in conferences, workshops and skill-sharing events that will prepare them for exciting jobs in research and technology.
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Wonhwa Cho, LAS Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences, LAS Distinguished Professor, and Head in the Department of Chemistry, has received a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for his project “Lipid regulation of cellular signaling and protein-protein interactions.” Membrane lipids (such as cholesterol) directly and specifically control cellular activities of diverse proteins that are critically involved in a range of human diseases. Building on novel recent discoveries about protein interactions and innovations in imaging methods in the Cho lab, the project will elucidate the mechanisms underlying complex lipid-mediated cell regulation and develop new strategies to modulate these processes. The research will lay the foundation for pioneering drug discovery, particularly for cancer. Ruixuan Gao, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry, has received nearly $1.4 million through the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (NIA), which supports “high risk, high reward” work by early career investigators. The Gao research group develops advanced microscopy and imaging methods to map and track molecular entities at their natural spatiotemporal scale and uses these tools to investigate the molecular bases of critical biological functions and dysfunctions, including neuronal connection and neurodegeneration. Professor Gao’s project, “A Biochemical Approach Towards Subcellular Label-Free Molecular Imaging” introduces a new imaging modality capable of spatially mapping intact biological and clinical samples at subcellular resolution. This will allow for high-precision diagnosis of disease with conventional mass spectrometry instrumentation in existing laboratories. Read more in UIC today. Adam Goodman, Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Latin American and Latino Studies received a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University for the 2022-2023 academic year, where he worked on a book exploring how US immigration policies since 1965 have left an increasing number of people in a precarious, often prolonged, state of limbo. Thomas Daniel Griffin, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, has received a four-year, $958,861 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project, “Effects of Instructional Analogies on Illusions of Understanding in Introductory Geoscience.” Using experimental data from Introductory Geoscience classrooms, the project will investigate the potential negative impact of analogies on metacomprehension – the accuracy of students’ judgments about their own understanding of complex scientific concepts – and develop instructional materials that reduce this negative impact. The results should have implications beyond the field of geology, as analogies are a pervasive aspect of learning environments across STEM fields. Russell J. Hemley, Professor and LAS Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences in the Departments of Physics and Chemistry, is the Principal Investigator on “Acquisition of a Physical Property Measurement System for Interdisciplinary Research and Education on Next Generation Materials” funded by a two-year National Science Foundation grant of $647,968. This award enables the acquisition of a Quantum Design Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS), a versatile and highly configurable instrument to measure electrical, magnetic, thermal transport, and thermodynamic properties of materials over a broad range of temperatures and pressures. The project will involve six collaborators from the College of Engineering and the Research Resources Center as well as co-PIs Jordi Cabana, Professor in the Department of Chemistry; Robert Klie, Professor in the Department of Physics and University Scholar; Dirk Morr, LAS Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics; and Michael Trenary, Professor in the Department of Chemistry. The PPMS will be a part of the UIC Research Resources Center (RRC) and will complement an array of other materials analysis capabilities available in the facility.
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Jonathan Inda, Chair and Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, is the Principal Investigator on a $785,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning program area for the project, “Scholars Under Threat in the Americas.” Through this grant, the department will establish a fellowship program to host two scholars, writers, or artists under threat in Latin America to reestablish or continue their professional careers. Among other related plans is a 2026 international conference on academic freedom and scholars under threat in the Americas. Vishesh Jain, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant for his project, “Non-Asymptomatic Random Matrix Theory and Connections,” This five-year, $439,219 award will enable Professor Jain to study novel methods in random matrix theory with a view towards resolving fundamental problems in a wide range of areas, including classical and combinatorial random matrix theory, numerical analysis, Markov chain Monte Carlo, statistical physics, discrepancy theory, and exact algorithms. The highly-competitive CAREER grant provides support for early-career investigators who demonstrate great potential to innovate their field through a proposed long-term research agenda. Constance Jeffery, Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, has a received a three-year, $414,164 Mid-Career Advancement Award from the National Science Foundation for her project, “Using Multiple Approaches to Understanding RNA Binding by Enzymes in Intermediary Metabolism.” Professor Jeffery will examine how certain proteins interact with and control RNA functions, which may lead to the design and development of novel methods to regulate many kinds of cellular activities as well as commercial biotechnology applications. Robert Klie, Professor in the Department of Physics and University Scholar, and Jordi Cabana, Professor in the Department of Chemistry, are Co-Principal Investigators on “Definition of the Fundamental Barriers to Multivalent Ion Interaction in Transition Metal Oxides,” a four-year, $799,929 United States Department of Defense-funded project. This award establishes a cutting-edge research program to significantly improve the electrochemistry research capabilities at UIC with a focus on increasing the participation of Hispanic students in STEM research, particularly innovative research in materials science. Professors Klie and Cabana will combine their expertise in materials synthesis, electrochemistry, and characterization to answer important basic questions in electrochemistry. The research will pave the way for the development of mobile, high-capacity, rechargeable batteries based on multivalentions. Such devices would produce transformational leaps in energy density. Professor Klie has also received a four-year, $549,718 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project, “Discovering Novel Properties in Few-Layer MXenes Using Analytical In-Situ Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy.” This project will use access to unique instrumentation at UIC to develop an atomic-scale understanding of the optical properties of MXenes to explore the potential for their applications in nano-photonics or plasmonics. The project also provides hands-on training for students in a novel field using state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopy and cutting-edge Machine Learning approaches.
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Amanda Lewis, Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and LAS Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies and Sociology, is the Principal Investigator with Co-PI Maria Krysan, LAS Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology, on a Spencer Foundation-funded project entitled “Teaching About Race, Racism, and Racial History: Investigating Experiences of Educators in Chicago.” The two-and-a-halfyear, $499,940 grant will enable Lewis and Krysan to conduct in-depth interviews, classroom observations, and focus groups to study the experiences of a racially diverse set of middle and high school teachers in Chicago who are asked to navigate classroom discussions and lessons centered on race and difference. The project aims to deliver both insights and resources for professional development in teaching multicultural curricula while contributing to a better understanding of racial identity in teaching and learning. Andrew Malone, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has received a two-year, $145,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, his first as Principal Investigator, for his collaborative project with colleagues at California Polytechnic University Humboldt and California State University Northridge entitled, “Glacier Resilience During the Holocene and late Pleistocene in Northern California.” The project uses a multi-disciplinary approach to reconstruct glacier history in the understudied Trinity Alps region of the Klamath Mountains of northern California and to evaluate mechanisms for these changes. The study will provide the first quantitative data on glaciation from the region, with societal impact for water resources in California and globally. Hayley Negrin, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, is the Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History at the Newberry Library for the next nine months. Professor Negrin’s fellowship will support the research and writing of her book, tentatively titled Fugitive Lands: Indigenous Slavery and Sovereignty in the Early American South.
Jane Rhodes, Professor of Black Studies and Associate Dean in the College, is the Co-Principal Investigator on a three-year, $500,000 Mellon Higher Learning-funded project entitled “Humanizing Critical Race Theory.” The project integrates humanities-based critical race and gender analysis into undergraduate curricula, faculty scholarship, and collaborative universitycommunity projects at UIC. Rhodes and Lead Principal Investigator Teri McMurtry-Chubb, Professor at UIC Law and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of History, will work collaboratively with a dozen scholars across the university to develop curricular and outreach tools that will prepare faculty and graduate students – particularly those who work with humanistic methods and theories – to teach versions of critical race and gender analysis to the next generation of undergraduate students. W. Andreas Schroeder, Professor in the Department of Physics, received a three-year, $515,000 renewal grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to deliver fundamental improvements in the quality of electron pulses through the discovery of promising new single-crystal photocathodes selected by ab initio theoretical techniques. The project should have immediate implications for the operational performance of instrumentation throughout the country’s research infrastructure, and the development of future high space-time resolution electron microscopes. Jan Hendrik Spille, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, has received a twoyear, $535,511 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project “Developing Next Generation Methods for Studying Cytoskeletal Factors in the Cell Nucleus.” This project will develop new and sharper tools to investigate the role of actin in the organization of the genome and the control of gene expression. These new tools will allow researchers to advance understanding of basic mechanisms that control genome positioning and gene usage. 6
Katherine E. Starkweather, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, has been awarded a $384,308 grant from the National Science Foundation for her project, “The Seasonal Behavioral Ecology of Respiratory Disease in a Tropical, Subsistence-Based Community.” The study uses in-depth interviews and community-wide behavioral and biological data to assess how social behavior and environmental conditions interact to affect the transmission and longer-term health impacts of common respiratory viruses in a tropical setting. This may help inform public health policy on how best to minimize transmission of respiratory viruses in diverse cultural settings world-wide. aría de los Ángeles Torres, LAS Distinguished Professor in Latin American and Latino M Studies, is the Co-Principal Investigator, with Professor Katrin Hansing of Bernard Baruch College, on a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the project, “Democratizing the Past: Cubans Remember the Angolan Civil War.” The project aims to excavate and document the stories of Cuban veterans of the Angolan Civil War between 1975-1991 and will culminate in a co-authored manuscript; a symposium; and an exhibit of photographs, personal artifacts, and paintings influenced by the war. Terrion Williamson, Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, has received funding from the Humanities Without Walls Consortium’s Grand Research Challenge for her project “Black Studies and Creative Praxis in the Greater Midwest.” This project brings together scholars, artists,and organizers for a series of linked activities that will converge at the Third BiennialBlack Midwest Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, in October 2024. The project is a collaboration between the Black Midwest Initiative, Sinclair Community College, Dayton Metro Library, Central State University, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Belt Publishing, and Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Katherine Zinsser, Associate Professor; Jessica Shaw, Associate Professor; and C. Ryne Estabrook, Assistant Clinical Professor, all of the Department of Psychology, have been awarded $599,977 from the William T. Grant Foundation for their project, “Interrogating Successive School Discipline Reforms as Levers for Promoting Racial Equity.” Since 2016, Illinois has restricted exclusionary discipline, but without focusing on mitigating disparities in how discipline is administered. This project will study the impact of reforms on racial inequalities in K-12 school suspensions and expulsions. Findings could shed light on how state laws aimed at reducing exclusion and their implementation at the district level may reduce racial disciplinary inequalities.
CONTACT US I f you would like assistance identifying funding opportunities or developing a proposal, please get in touch with Anna Brailovsky, Assistant Director of Faculty Research Activities or visit the LAS Research Development Website.
If you have news to share, please get in touch with our Director of Marketing and Communications, Jon Cecero, either via the News Tips form or directly via email.
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AWARDS AND HONORS Four LAS faculty were honored at the 2022 Researcher, Scholar, and Inventor of the Year Awards. These awards celebrate the efforts and commitment of individuals who have made exceptional progress advancing knowledge in their area of research and scholarship, inspiring and promoting continued excellence at UIC. Distinguished Scholar in Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture: Mark Canuel, Professor in the Department of English. Professor Canuel’s research focuses on political theory, aesthetics and literary form. He explores the ways in which literary art is central to the conceptualizing and reshaping of modern institutions. Distinguished Researcher in Social Science: Alexandra Filindra, Associate Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Psychology. Professor Filindra’s scholarship focuses on the meaning and scope of democratic citizenship, exploring this idea in multiple ways and settings, primarily through immigration and gun politics. Her work on gun politics is situated at the intersection of race and gender politics and draws on critical race theory, history, criminal justice perspectives and political psychology. Daniel Borzutzky, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Latin American and Latino Studies, won the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation from the Spanish of Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl. In the judges’ citation, he is credited for a “courageous translation” that “moves through the prose and the poetic, acutely, to bring us closer to the vulnerability of language. With such risks, he takes translation into a new direction, opening a new conversation around the practice and the choice of the translator.”
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Bette Bottoms, Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology, was named the inaugural recipient of the American Psychological Association Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice Division’s inaugural 2023 Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. This award honors an individual for a career of research that has “contributed significantly to society’s understanding of changes in publicpolicies related to children and families or to the creation, evaluation or dissemination of evidence-based practices designed to help children and families affected by mental health problems or by difficult family relationships.”
ising Star in Social Science: R Jennifer A. Jones, Associate Professor, in the Departments of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies. Professor Jones conducts research at the intersection of the sociology of race, immigration and politics that transforms the understanding of how race shapes group and individual identities, and how it shapes meaning-making. ising Star in Humanities, Arts, Design R and Architecture: Ronak K. Kapadia, Associate Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. Professor Kapadia conducts interdisciplinary research that engages critical ethnic studies, transnational queer and feminist studies, visual culture and performance studies and critical studies of US empire and the national security state. Julie Dowling, Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies, received the 2022 American Sociological Association Public Understanding of Sociology Award. Dowling was selected for this award because of her extensive efforts to translate her sociological research and expertise into strategies to ensure an accurate and inclusive count of the US population on the 2020 Census. Nan Jiang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, was named a 2023 Fellow of the American Vacuum Society. This fellowship recognizes AVS members who have made sustained and outstanding scientific and technical contributions in areas of interest to AVS. Professor Jiang was recognized “for significant advances in sub-nm spatially resolved Raman spectroscopy of adsorbed molecules and lowdimensional materials.”
Robert Klie, Professor in the Department of Physics, was named a University Scholar in the 2023-2024 academic year. Klie is one of only six recipients across the entire campus to receive the three-year award, which recognizes superior performance in scholarly activities and promise for future achievements. Nicole Looper, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, has received a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The award recognizes the achievements and potential of early-career scholars, and provides a $75,000 award that can be spent over the course of two years on any expense supportive of their research. Joel (Ronnie) Nagloo, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, was awarded the 2023–2024 American Mathematical Society’s Centennial Research Fellowship, which is presented based on the excellence of the scholar’s research. Kathryn Nagy, Professor and Head in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, was named a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, one of 10 members elected this year for the honor. Fellows are selected from members who have contributed significantly to the advancement of mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry, petrology, or allied sciences and whose scientific contribution utilized mineralogical studies or data.
Carol Stein, Professor Emerita in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, was named the 2023 Professional Excellence Award Winner for Academia/Research by the Association of Women Geoscientists. Donald Wink, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Learning Sciences Research Institute, is the 2024 recipient of the American Chemical Society’s George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education. The award is supported by an endowed fund established by the ACS Division of Chemical Education and the Board of Publications that supports the Journal of Chemical Education and ChemEdX. It was announced in the Sept 18, 2023 issue of the ACS’s Chemical and Engineering News. Read more in UIC today. Katherine Zinsser, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Psychology graduate students H. Callie Silver, Elyse R. Shenberger, and Velisha Jackson were awarded the 2023 Review of Research Award, which is given in recognition of an outstanding review of a research article appearing in the Review of Research in Education or the Review of Educational Research. Zinsser was the lead author on their article, “A Systematic Review of Early Childhood Exclusionary Discipline.”
James Pellegrino, LAS Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology, Emeritus Distinguished Professor in the College of Education, and founding co-Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute, received the 2023 E. F. Lindquist Award, presented jointly by the American Educational Research Association and American College Testing. The award is conferred in recognition of outstanding applied or theoretical research in the field of testing and measurement. The award acknowledges a body of research of an empirical, theoretical or integrative nature rather than a single study. 9
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