grant highlights
ETHICS AND EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM FOUNDATION AWARDS $25,000 GRANT
In February 2009, the Journalism Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was awarded a $25,000 grant by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation in support of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, comprised of investigative journalism centers spread from six continents. Specifically, the grant would provide for the creation of a website that will offer forums for discussions, digital working space, online training modules and guidance on carrying out investigative stories. The project will be coordinated by Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and a Professor in the Journalism Department at the College of Media.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS AWARDED GRANT FROM ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION FOR FOLKLORE PROJECT
In January 2009, the University of Illinois Press, along with three other institutions, received notice of a grant made to support the creation of a book series entitled, "Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World." The grant is part of an initiative by the Mellon Foundation to promote scholarship in underserved or emerging fields as well as to support the work of university presses in exploing these fields. The Folklore project will explore the interdisciplinary and international nature of current folklore scholarship.
COLLEGE OF MEDIA RECEIVES GRANT FROM THE MARAJEN STEVICK FOUNDATION FOR MEDIA ACCESS PROJECT
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the Marajen Stevick Foundation to pay for projects that use new media and technology to engage communities. The Marajen Stevick Foundation was created by the estate of Marajen Stevick Chinigo, the late owner and publisher of The News-Gazette. The Foundation provides funding for various literary and educational activities in East Central Illinois.
The media access project will be a partnership between The News-Gazette and the UI College of Media and will focus on designing ways to reach residents in poverty, many of whom do not have access to services, and may involve cell-phone alerts, bilingual radio and television reports and training citizen reporters. An interactive Web site also will be created.
two university library archivists receive andrew w. mellon TECHNOLOGY award
In December 2008, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library was awarded a $100,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) for leadership and development work on Archon™—a set of web-based tools for describing archives and manuscripts collections and for providing on-line access to related digital objects, such as photographs and electronic records. Archon was developed especially to assist the many small repositories who often lack the technological and financial resources to make their collections easily accessible to worldwide audiences. Chris Prom, assistant university archivist and associate professor of library administration, and Associate Professor and Archivist Scott Schwartz co-direct the project.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bestow MATC Awards to recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. The $100,000 award recognizes highly significant contributions to open source projects offering benefits to more or larger constituencies.
Gates Foundation Awards $100K grant to Animal Sciences
Professor Alfred Roca of the UI Department of Animal Sciences has been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through its Grand Challenges Explorations Program. Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative designed to help scientists pursue innovative ideas that have the potential to result in scientific breakthroughs and technologies for addressing serious global health problems. Professor Roca's project will test the possibility that isolated African populations may have evolved genetic resistance to HIV. Ascertaining whether they display resistance to HIV could lead to new ways of fighting HIV in other populations.
The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Supports Scandinavian Studies
The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation has awarded the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures with a $33,500 grant to expand the Scandinavian Studies and Swedish Language Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The grant helps support additional course offerings in Swedish during summer 2008 and the 2008-09 academic year as well as outreach activities and new course initiatives. The Scandinavian Program, led by Assistant Professor Anna Stenport, educates nearly 300 students every year in the Swedish and Scandinavian languages, cultures, histories, and institutions.
The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation supports Swedish-related cultural and educational projects in both Sweden and the USA. Barbro Osher is also Sweden's Consul General in San Francisco.
UI Receives $4 Million from Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation
In May 2008, the University of Illinois’ Board of Trustees announced three grants totaling $4.025 million dollars in support of campus sustainability and energy initiatives, awarded by the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation. Specifically, the funding provides $1.2 million for lighting upgrades; $2 million for a wind turbine project and $825,000 for a bioenergy research project.
The Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation is an independent foundation with an endowment established by Commonwealth Edison. The foundation awards grants to fund energy-conserving and money-saving facility improvements for local governments, non-profit organizations, schools and universities.
More details about the grants can be found in the full press release.
Two Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators Named
In May 2008, two University of Illinois faculty members received the distinction of being named Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. Phillip A. Newmark, a professor of cell and developmental biology, and Wilfred A. van der Donk, the William H. and Janet Lycan professor of chemistry, were two of 56 researchers selected as HHMI investigators out of a field of over 1,000 applicants nationwide. The Urbana-Champaign campus currently has one other HHMI investigator and an HHMI professor.
The Maryland-based Institute invests in leading scientists and researchers in the biomedical research and science education field. The multi-year awards made by HHMI support the costs of the researchers and their projects, facilitating a greater focus on innovative research ideas.
More details about the HHMI recipients can be found in the full press release.
Carver Trust Awards Two Grants
At its April 2008 board meeting, the trustees of the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust awarded two grants to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ryan C. Bailey, assistant professor of chemistry, will receive a three-year $300,065 grant from the Trust to support his work in cell adhesion environments in cancer metastasis.
The second award is a $330,000 challenge grant to support the acquisition of an experimental optical microscope that will provide unprecedented microscopy capabilities to researchers in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, as well as other scientists on campus. The University and its new Molecular and Cellular Biology Imaging Facility is one of the first international alpha test sites for the instrument. The project director is Andrew Belmont, professor and head of Cell and Developmental Biology.
The Carver Charitable Trust, with offices located in Muscatine, Iowa, supports cutting-edge biomedical and scientific research, scholarships, and programs addressing the educational and recreational needs of youth throughout Iowa and Illinois.
Grand Victoria Foundation supports Illinois Promise with $200,000 grant
Grand Victoria Foundation has awarded a two-year, $200,000 grant to the University of Illinois to support Illinois Promise scholarships. Launched in 2005 by Chancellor Richard Herman, the Illinois Promise program is designed to help make a University of Illinois education affordable for economically disadvantaged students in the state who qualify for admission. Specifically, Illinois Promise awards cover the difference between a student’s financial aid package and the actual cost of an Illinois education, including tuition, fees, room and board, and books and supplies. The goal of the program is to enable students with severe financial need to attend the UI without incurring significant debt. Similar programs, like the Carolina Covenant at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, have demonstrated that students who do not need to worry about paying back substantial student loans or working full time to make ends meet are more successful in their studies.
All funding for the Illinois Promise program comes from private gifts and grants. The grant from Grand Victoria Foundation will provide Illinois Promise scholarships to 33 Illinois students in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Grand Victoria Foundation provides strategic funding to Illinois organizations working for lasting economic, educational and environmental change. Since it was established in 1996 by the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Illinois, the Foundation has provided more than $90 million in grants to help communities across the state become vibrant places to live and work. Through grantmaking and leadership initiatives, Grand Victoria Foundation supports five elements of great communities: good jobs, a healthy environment, great places for kids, capable organizations and homegrown philanthropy. The Foundation has offices in Chicago and Elgin. For more information, please visit the Foundation web site or call 312.609.0200.
Mellon Foundation announces two $50,000 awards under its Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration Program
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded two grants to the University of Illinois in its second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) competition. Through MATC, the foundation recognizes leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. The two awards were announced in December 2007 at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, D.C.
One of the $50,000 grants was awarded to the Firefox Accessibility Extension project,a program designed to extendthe features of the Firefox web browser in supporting people with disabilities as well as in assisting web developers in evaluating accessibility features of their website. Jon Gunderson, Applied Health Sciences, is the project director.
A second $50,000 award went to the OpenEAI Project, an open-source venture dedicated to discovering and documenting the dynamics, principles and practices of enterprise application integration. Douglas Vinzant, Senior Associate Vice President for Planning and Administration, accepted the award on behalf of the University. Funds from this award will support graduate fellowships in the Integration Competency Center of the Administrative IT Services Department.
Lumina Foundation for Education helps launch TEAM program to facilitate community college transfer
The Lumina Foundation for Education has awarded the College Of Education with an $899,000 grant for a project that will enable greater numbers of Illinois community college students, particularly those from underrepresented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to earn baccalaureate degrees at four-year institutions. Taking advantage of the state’s well-developed community college network, the University of Illinois will develop strategic partnerships with targeted community colleges to establish and model the Transfer Experience and Advising Mentors (TEAM) program. TEAM is designed to advance access and success in postsecondary education by providing the information, individual counseling, and hands-on assistance with the transfer process that many students need to achieve their educational goals. In addition, the project will offer online bridge coursework and a dedicated academic adviser to facilitate access to and attainment of an Illinois education. On a national scale, the project will also promote access and success in postsecondary education by developing model programs and approaches to removing barriers that can be replicated by peer public research institutions.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports
humanities digitization efforts
In early 2007, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS)with two technology grants for projects that build on different aspects of GSLIS’ extensive work on the use of digital libraries in scholarly communication. Both multi-institutional projects, which received a total of $2.2 million from the Mellon Foundation, include research teams from several other universities and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), based in Illinois. Professor John Unsworth, Dean of GSLIS, will lead the “Metadata Offer New Knowledge” (MONK) project, which extends work previously funded by the Mellon Foundation both at Illinois and at Northwestern University. The project attempts to facilitate scholarly analysis of literary texts using digitized libraries and data mining techniques. By creating an extensive testbed of digitized materials, as well as a common environment and appropriate tools for scholars, the MONK project is expected to lead not only to new techniques for textual analysis but may also foster new forms of research. The second project, called SEASR, or Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, is led by Professor Michael Welge of NCSA, with Professor Unsworth serving as one of the co-principal investigators. SEASR focuses on developing, integrating, deploying, and sustaining a set of reusable and expandable software components and a supporting framework, SEASR, which will benefit a broad set of data mining applications for scholars in humanities. Two important benefits from the development of SEASR will be the creation of a vibrant digital humanities community and technology transfer between diverse disciplines that traditionally have had little interaction.
Three University of Illinois faculty receive Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships
Sloan Fellowship awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. The Sloan Fellowship awards are highly competitive, involving nominations from the very best scientists of this generation from the United States and Canada. A total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Fellowships are awarded for a two-year period and are used by the Fellow for such purposes as equipment, technical assistance, professional travel, trainee support, or any other activity directly related to the Fellow's research. Three Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships of $45,000 each were awarded to the following Illinois faculty in 2007:
- Yuanyuan Zhou, Associate Professor of Computer Science. Professor Zhou focuses on software bug detection, diagnosis, and correction.
- Chad M. Rienstra, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. His research interests are in solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR), including the development of new pulse sequence methodology and instrumentation, and application to studies of protein structure and dynamics.
- Christina White, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Her research interests are in the field of organic synthesis with an emphasis on the discovery of transition-metal mediated reactions that address unsolved problems in organic methodology.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant helps catalog the UI Rare Book and Manuscript collection
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign contains at least 70,000 items that have been mostly inaccessible to the outside world. Thanks to a $604,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the University is undertaking a project, to be led by Rare Book head Valerie Hotchkiss, to catalogue these largely hidden items that represent nearly a quarter of the Library’s total collection. The planned project, named "An Embarrassment of Riches," aims to make every book in the collection accessible via the University's online catalog. According to Hotchkiss, the collection is one of the largest and most remarkable in the country. The collection includes the third-largest University collection of 15th century books, including a large portion of an original Gutenberg Bible.
College of Education wins Spencer Foundation grant for study on religious courses in public schools
Professors Richard Layton (Religious Studies) and Walter Feinberg (Educational Policy Studies) received $193,000 in support from the Spencer Foundation for their project, "Current Initiatives to Teach Courses on Religion in Public Schools: Visions of American Citizenship Education." The project undertakes a detailed study of courses on religion currently implemented in public schools. Layton and Feinberg will 1) inventory state initiatives to introduce courses on religion and Bible into the public schools; 2) describe, compare and analyze the expressed aims of such courses; 3) describe the conduct of instruction in sample schools; 4) explore the potential educational advantages and disadvantages of such courses in relation to the norms of citizenship development in liberal pluralism; 5) provide guidelines useable by school boards, administrators and teachers considering such courses.