The Graduate College invites applications from graduate students and postdocs interested in serving as URAP Mentors in the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) during 2023-24. URAP is a valuable professional development opportunity during which you will gain hands-on experience mentoring undergraduate researchers. Graduate students and postdocs in any field are welcome to apply. An information session will be held on May 10. Applications are due June 15. Learn more about the program at the link above.

The Graduate College is pleased to announce the graduate winners of the 2023 Image of Research competition. Now in its tenth year, Image of Research is a multidisciplinary competition celebrating the diversity and breadth of graduate student research at UIUC. The winners are: Elizabeth Bello (1st Prize), Joseph Obanubi (2nd Prize), Han Wang (3rd Prize), Yony T. Callohuari Quispe (Honorable Mention), Mitisha Surana (Honorable Mention), and Darby Danzl (People's Choice Award). View the online gallery of semifinalists and learn more about Image of Research.

The results are in for Research Live!, the fast-paced competition that celebrates graduate student research at UIUC. The winners are: Yaman Yu (The Visionary Award), Joe Mirabelli (The Storyteller Award), Ricky Price (The Impact Award), Erick Hernandez Alvarez (The Design Award), Abdulgafar Sulaiman (The People's Choice Award), and Charles Nudelman (The Grand Prize). Thank you to those who voted for the People's Choice Award at the Research Live! Finalist Showcase!

Friday, April 28 at 5 p.m. is the last day to complete a dissertation deposit for May 2023 graduation. Because all corrections and all required deposit materials must be received by the Graduate College no later than 5 p.m. on the day of the deposit deadline, the Thesis Office strongly encourages students to submit the thesis for review several days before the deadline. For further information about the deposit process, visit the Thesis Office website. 

Join the Prevention Staff from the WRC as we explore what consent looks like and practice our sexual communication skills. Plus, cookies! Dinner is provided. Cosponsored by the Women’s Resources Center, International Education, and International Student and Scholar Services. Funded by the Student Cultural Programming Fee (SCPF). 

Looking for a quiet place to work that is not the library or your room? Come by Coble Hall 306 the morning of Thursday, April 20 to do work and enjoy some coffee and baked goods courtesy of the EU Center. We will also offer some quiet crafts and activities, such as puzzles and coloring pages, that can help you destress. RSVPing (via this form) is appreciated but not required.

Considering a Fulbright U.S. Student Award? Please join the Office of External Fellowships this week for a crash course in proposal writing tailored specifically for the Fulbright Statement of Grant Purpose. In this workshop we will show students how best to approach this statement; how to present their project in the most direct, concrete, and convincing way possible; and how to strategize their narrative in light of Fulbright’s mission and aims. We’ll also review sample statements. The workshop will be held twice via Zoom; please register in advance. 

The ability to craft an effective funding proposal can reap a lifetime of rewards. As a graduate student, now is the time to hone your grantwriting proficiency. In this online workshop, designed for students in science, technology, engineering, and math, you will learn how to identify funding opportunities, strategize the components of an effective proposal, and think like a grant writer. Register.

If you are a doctoral student planning to deposit your dissertation for May graduation, get a head start by taking your exit surveys now! These surveys will only take a few minutes for you to complete, and (if you take them before you submit your document to the Thesis Office) it will make the deposit process move much more quickly. You can learn more about these surveys on the Thesis Office website. Remember – you cannot deposit your dissertation until the Thesis Office receives notification that you have completed these surveys.

Attending a career fair or other networking event? This workshop will provide tips for corresponding concisely and professionally in platforms like email and LinkedIn. This event will be held  through Zoom. It is open to current University of Illinois affiliates (students, faculty, and staff). Please register with your University of Illinois email account by 11:59pm CT on April 18, and we will send an email with the Zoom meeting invitation on the morning of the event.

Teaching diaspora subjects transcends disciplinary boundaries. How do we approach the transnational networks of diaspora groups, and their multifaceted identities across linguistic and cultural spaces, in a teaching environment? Join faculty, staff, students, and representatives from academic units as we discuss curriculum development, course design, and language instruction for studying and researching diaspora communities from around the world.

Learn more about the literature review's purpose and gain tips for writing an effective one, either as a stand-alone piece or part of a larger project. Graduate writers from any discipline are welcome. This is an online event and will be held through Zoom. It is open to current University of Illinois affiliates (students, faculty, and staff). Please register with your University of Illinois email account by 11:59pm CT on April 19, and we will send an email with a Zoom meeting invitation on the morning of the event.

We will dissect the key components Fulbright reviewers are seeking to glean from the personal statement, review and discuss past winning Fulbright personal statements, and assist you in beginning to sketch and portray your own story. You need not know your desired destination or specific Fulbright project to benefit from this workshop. The session is for juniors, seniors and beginning graduate students applying for any type of Fulbright grant and preparing materials for the Fulbright Priority Deadline of June 26, 2023 for grants beginning in fall 2024. Register here for this Zoom workshop.

Please join us for the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) speaker series episode 9: Conflicts of Interest and Commitment. Our speaker will be Linda Lee Drozt, Director of Strategic Regulatory Programs and Conflicts of Interest Officer in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation.

RESCHEDULED: Join Weights and Biases Machine Learning Engineer Andrea Parker for an online workshop April 19 at 3 p.m. that includes a W&B introduction and product walkthrough focusing on Experiment tracking, W&B Tables, Sweeps, Artifacts, Dashboards/Reports and Integrations. It will be followed by a Colab classification competition in Kaggle with swag for top submissions. Sign up!

Next Friday (April 21, 1–2pm), we will hold our last event for Spring 2023: TOWN HALL MEETING at ECEB 3013! We highly encourage people who are currently or will (plan to) run a DEI initiative to join our discussion. This event is a collaboration with RISE UP, another GIANT team ended in 2022, to share our experiences of conducting DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) activities and research on campus. Sign up before next Tuesday, April 18th!

Environmental Activism and Change on Campus & Beyond. In this conversation, the Diversity & Social Justice Ed. interns and student panelists will highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in ensuring that our path forward in environmentalism efforts is a truly just effort, one that includes centering access and equity for marginalized communities. Conversation Cafe is part of the Student Affairs Lunch on Us series and is paid for, in part, by the Student Cultural Programming Fee (SCPF).

The Ecofeminism Summit offers programs designed to connect social justice, environmental justice, and feminist theory. The 2023 Ecofeminism Summit (April 19 - 28) will explore the intersection of social oppression and environmental justice through a series of events featuring Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, Dr. Rosalyn Lapier, and Students for Environmental Concerns! Go to https://go.illinois.edu/ecofeminism for more information!

Join the International and Area Studies Library over Zoom on Friday, April 21st at 2:00 p.m. CST for the last International Cooking Show of the spring semester! For this installment, Raissa Gonzalez will be making sopa de maní, a Bolivian peanut soup, for us! The recipe (and a recorded version of the show) will be shared after the event so that you can cook along and try the dish out for yourself.

We are hosting this town hall meeting to engage with scholars on this campus. A free exchange of ideas and perspectives is critical to shaping our research experience. Initiating a community-wide discussion is never easy. We hope through these discussions, individual scholars and students will be able to share their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and needs in an inclusive and open-ended environment.  All are welcome!

Join F&S and volunteer to count parked bicycles on campus Wednesday, April 26, 10–11 a.m. The census data that is collected will help update the campus bike parking map as well as be used to make future decisions around bicycle infrastructure and programs. Virtual training will be provided from 9-10 a.m. Learn more about the census here.

Do you use SAS® Software for teaching, research, or administrative purposes at the University of Illinois? Consider joining the exploratory University of Illinois SAS® Users Group (Illinois-SUG)! We aim to build a productive community of campus researchers and students that use the SAS® Software System. For more information, join our Channel on Microsoft Teams.

Student Affairs together with the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (MTD) are hosting a "Campus Town Hall" on April 25, 2023 from 4:30 - 6:00 PM in 104 Illini Union. There will be a brief presentation from MTD Staff, followed by an open forum of questions and discussion. We welcome your feedback and hope you can join us! RSVP Now!

Nikky Finney and Ruth Nicole Brown in conversation, with Janice Harrington moderating. Nikky Finney was raised during the Civil Rights movements and is the author of Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, and others. Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown’s analyzes Black girls’ lived experiences. Her previous work has explored how Black girls conceptualize freedom, creativity, and relationships.

Push4Art is an arts initiative focused on partnering Krannert Center for the Performing Arts with student talent on campus to create spontaneous pop-up performances. Find the Push4Art podium with a button on top of it (near Stage 5 in the Lobby), press it, and enjoy the performance!

The International and Area Studies Library's International Film Night is back! On Thursday, April 20th, Karel Zeman's classic Czechoslovak science-fiction film Invention for Destruction will be screened in Room 66 of the Main Library. Doors will open for the event starting at 6:30 p.m., and the screening will begin at 7:00 p.m. after a brief introduction. 

Dance at Illinois presents the culminating concert of the BFA Class of 2023, featuring the work of seven choreographers including Jason Brickman, Elsa Gaston, Noa Greenfeld, Kymani Davis-Williams, Aliah Teclaw, Derrick Rossbach, and Hannah Tharp.

Join host Chaz Ebert and accompanying filmmakers at the 23rd annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival from April 19-22 at the Virginia Theatre. The program for Ebertfest, “Empathy at the Movies,” includes 11 films, two shorts, 20+ filmmaker guests participating in post-screening discussions, and two musical performances. Film fest passes and individual movie tickets are available to purchase online.

Violins of Hope will kick off with an opening concert featuring co-founder Avshalom Weinstein of Violins of Hope and a doctoral lecture recital by violinist, Becca Kasdan: "Imagining New Possibilities for Classical Music Performance in the 21st Century: Drawing Inspiration from the Berlin Cabarets of the Weimar Republic." Join us for an inspiring evening at the Spurlock to include musical world premieres, shadow puppetry and marionettes, dancers, and visual artists from seven countries. It will be followed by a dessert reception.

Join us for a screening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), an experimental documentary by Black Emmy award-winning filmmaker William Greaves that was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2015. Ebert Symposium keynote speaker Amir George, artistic director of Kartemquin Films, selected the film and will introduce it. 

Professor Joseph DeSimone, the Sanjiv Sam Gambhir Professor of Translational Medicine and Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, will present "Light, materials and interfaces: The complex dance that allows CLIP-based 3D printing" at 11 a.m. Wednesday, April 19, in the Beckman Institute Auditorium. A reception will follow.

The Center for Global Studies and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois present: Away From the Empire: The Linguistic and Cultural Shift In Ukraine in the Wake of the Russian Invasion. Guest speakers: Alex Averbuch, Yuliya Ilchuk, Volodymyr Dubovyk, Oleksandra Deineko, Olesia Bozhko, Yaryna Zakalaska, Serhii Yanchuk.

Please join Tang Heng (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) for her lecture, Diversity: A Socioculturally-Constructed Concept. Tang will present a study of teachers' perspectives on student differences in Singapore to problematize how the words “diversity” and “diverse” are used in different contexts as well as illuminate how the terms are socioculturally constructed. Available in person or on Zoom.

Join Winifred R. Poster as she discusses the rising employment of women in information and communications technology using the case of village data processing centers in India. Winifred R. Poster is a lecturer in International Affairs at Washington University, St. Louis and Director of Labor Tech Research Network. Lunch provided for in-person attendees with RSVP. 

This year’s Ebert Symposium addresses "Documentary, Violence, and the Media." Amir George from Kartemquin Films presents the keynote “To Be Radical,” followed by two roundtable discussions with faculty from the Department of Media & Cinema Studies and several guest filmmakers from Ebertfest. Free and open to the public.

The Community Data Clinic at the School of Information Sciences invites you to a speaker event on Reparation + Resistance: Digital Archives in Latin America. This will be a conversation with two archives in the region that create collective memory to address social conflict and state oppression. The invited archives are Comisión de la Verdad from Colombia and Londres 38 from Chile. RSVP Here! 

Saturday Engineering for Everyone is an open and free lecture series for anyone – students, faculty, staff and the local community – interested in learning more about engineering. On April 22 Associate Professor Kirill Levchenko will describe how his team developed an app to detect card skimmers at gas pumps in his presentation "Finding Gas Pump Skimmers Using Mobile Phones."

Please join the Grainger College of Engineering Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) for the 2023 IDEA Conference poster session. This event showcases the Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) program, which enables teams of students, postdocs, staff, and faculty to propose and implement research-based DEI initiatives.

Graduate students and faculty in engineering who identify as a minority gender (woman, non-binary, trans, etc.) are welcome to an end-of-year Happy Hour on April 20, from 5 - 8 PM in CIF 2039. Come take a break with fellow students and faculty! For free tapas and mocktails, register here by April 18.

What is your "Dare to" moment in life? It's not just about the big moments in life, but also the small aspects that challenge us every day. For this event at TEDxUIUC Salon, we have 6 inspiring speakers, including 3 graduate students, who will share their own experiences of daring to take bold steps towards success.

Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623, gathered 36 of the Bard’s plays, including 18 that would otherwise have disappeared. Don your Elizabethan finery and come help us mark this 400th milestone: see RBML’s Shakespearean treasures, dare to recite a few lines, and “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” This event is free and open to all; refreshments & party favors will be on hand!

Join We CU to celebrate the students, service learning instructors, and community partners who have made an impact on our community this year! Drop in anytime between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. on April 27 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center for an informal reception with light refreshments. An RSVP is requested, but not required.  

Genome editing is no longer in the distant future. Using CRISPR technology, scientists can activate or inhibit functions of various genes to better understand and cure diseases. Explore the potential benefits, unintended consequences, and moral dilemmas of this revolutionary technology.