The Civil Service Employees and Dependents Scholarship Program Fund in honor of Marjorie Beasley provides financial assistance to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil service employees and their dependents in their pursuit of an undergraduate degree at an accredited college or university. Application deadline is April 4. Click on the link above for more details and to apply.

PITA grants enable recipients to design, implement and assess instructional innovation that has a high probability of enhancing education at Illinois. Successful applicants will receive $7,500 in financial assistance for their proposed activities. Application deadline is Monday, March 27, 2023 at 11:59 pm.

The Chancellor's Senior Survey is now in the field for May 2023 graduates. Help increase the response rate for your unit by encouraging undergraduate seniors to complete the survey. Promotional materials can be found here. Students can look up their unique survey link here. Additional information about the survey administration for Spring 2023 can be found here.

Save the date for the IT Professionals Forum, June 6-7, 2023! This Spring's theme, "Familiar Faces, New Frontiers," was selected in part because this will be our first return to a hybrid in-person format since the pandemic began! Submit your presentation proposal via online form to have your topic considered. The deadline for submission is at 5 p.m. CST on Friday, March 31, 2023.    

Learn to calm your mind.  Can you make a commitment to listen to daily mindfulness audios? Click here to read the class description and to sign up. Classes are also open to individuals who are not affiliated with the U of I. 20-hours of classroom instruction Thursdays 5 - 7 pm online beginning April 13 to June 1, 2023 with one 4-hour Saturday online session on June 3, 2023.

The University of Illinois Faculty Entrepreneurial Leadership Program (FELP) is a professional development program for faculty interested in entrepreneurship as a path to maximize the socio-economic impact of their research. Please fill out your completed application form and send to your dean or institute director. Deadline to apply is April 1. Questions? Please contact felp@business.illinois.edu

The new Dr. Tai R. Shin & Mrs. You H. Shin Humanitarian Award allows the honoree to in turn award $50,000 to a department or program. Honoree nominations based on award criteria are due May 1. The preference is for recipients to be alumni of system universities. For more information, contact Julian Parrott at jparrott@uillinois.edu.

The CQI Community invites you to submit a proposal for the 2023 Annual CQI Community Conference. The conference will be held October 11 & 12, 2023 at IHotel.

We are seeking proposals for workshops that feature innovative quality improvement strategies, methods, and tools that are practical, proven, or promising. Find all the details on our website: https://cqi.cfrc.illinois.edu/con_info.php.

Take a break, relax and refresh with Yoga and Meditation session at the Illini Union Room 407 hosted by SKY at UIUC every Friday 6-7pm. We do light yoga, breathwork and a short guided meditation to revitalize the body-mind complex, have fun interactions and make new friends! 

The Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Program is the premier campus award recognizing scholarly contributions and excellence in the areas of teaching and learning. Successful applicants will receive $7,500 in financial assistance for their proposed activities and up to $7,500 in additional teaching or research support. Applications should be submitted by Monday, March 27th, 2023 by 11:59 pm.

Cybersecurity training helps you stay safer online, and your feedback is important. Please take the short 2023 Cybersecurity Training Survey at https://go.uillinois.edu/securitysurvey. All responses are confidential. We appreciate your participation as it helps us provide you with more engaging training opportunities! Please contact us at securitytraining@uillinois.edu if you have any questions.

The 2023 Campus Space Survey reporting period will be April 24–June 30. Once the survey opens, facility liaisons and business managers can complete the annual required inventory through the ARCHIBUS Web Central online portal. Please update departmental floor plans and occupancy/room usage data to enable an efficient survey process. More Web Central user accounts may be requested.

A Short Introduction to Caribbean Studies, Dr. Jose Atiles Osoria (Sociology).  This short introduction surveys the contemporary issues in the Caribbean region and its current legal, economic, and sociopolitical challenges. Taking global and transnational perspectives, we will discuss the multiple processes that led the Caribbean region to its current economic, political, and social vulnerability.

Dr. Jaimes talk examines how the Habsburg Empire under Franz Joseph (1848-1916) used monarchy as the foundational and focal point for shared loyalties to construct the monarch as representative of the state. This contentious and contested reign shows the importance of monarchy even in a time of nationalist upheaval, and trace how monarchical ideas reverberate in recent history.

This workshop will cover accessible practices when teaching online courses with a focus on open access, accessible e-resources from the University Library. This session is for anyone teaching online workshops or classes and wants to update their teaching materials to be accessible or anyone who would like to know more about accessible e-resources.

ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, ORCID, SSRN, Amazon Author Page, IDEALS, and Illinois Experts are just some of the online scholarly collaboration networks you might be trying to manage. Learn more about how to effectively use researcher profile systems and scholarly communications networks to develop and manage your online scholarly presence.

This is the first event in ECE's 2023 series of Saturday Engineering for Everyone, an open and free lecture series aimed at non-engineers of all backgrounds who are interested in learning about engineering. This Saturday come and learn about immersive learning through virtual reality with ECE Associate Professor Raluca Ilie.

Sign up now for the CSBS + CCIL Cancer Research Symposium happening on May 2nd. Co-sponsored by the Center for Social and Behavioral Science and the Cancer Center at Illinois, this in-person symposium aims to unite Illinois researchers interested in research addressing aspects of cancer care. A light breakfast, refreshments, and lunch will be served. Register here: https://bit.ly/3FwTISW

Learn the Angus Reel from Scotland, the Lovely Hula Hands from Hawaii, and even the Swiss Chicken Dance — and much more — at International Folk Dancing Classes being offered at Allerton starting April 10 in the Allerton Mansion! In this class, you will learn dances from a variety of countries, including the history behind each dance. Cost is $15/person/session. Learn more and register here.

In this five-week Storytelling Class, you will learn how to select stories you can tell, how to learn stories and remember them, and how and where to perform them. These will be a “safe space” where all are encouraged to join in, but only if they wish to. Cost is $15/person/session. Your instructor will be Judy Lachman.

Check in to your discounted room on Saturday, then head to downtown Monticelllo for a meal at 3Ravens Food & Spirits and receive 10 percent off by showing your room key! Then make the short drive to the Monticello Theatre Association for their Playwright Showcase (tickets required), or head back to the Mansion for the acoustic music of Luke Rund. 

Join bird artist Alex Warnick as she shares tips for painting birds in watercolor. Participants will learn techniques through instructor demonstrations and will have the chance to apply those techniques while creating their own painting from live birds. Cost is $40/person, which includes all materials. All sales are final. Register here.

William Camargo "Photography, Process,and the Movement to Decolonize Photography"

Join Sinfonia da Camera for an evening of musical imagery inspired by English Painters, Poets, and Playwrights! The program includes Portsmouth Point Overture, There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook, and London Everyday Suite. In collaboration with Lyric Theatre @ Illinois, the evening concludes with a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera Trial by Jury — ending with “joy unbounded!”

Paul Selvin, Professor of Biological Physics at Illinois, will lecture on “Live Brain Slices & Neurons at Nanometer-resolution” at 4:00 pm March 22 in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom.  Shannon Berneche, MBM trainee and PhD candidate, will give an introduction.

The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program.

Faculty and staff that wish to order Microsoft Teams-compatible equipment can see it at the final campus-wide Hardware Showcase hosted by ATLAS on Tuesday, March 21 from 11 am – 2 pm at the Foreign Languages Building in the Lucy Ellis Lounge. 707 S. Matthews Ave., Urbana, IL. Departments are encouraged to place equipment orders immediately. The Skype to Teams transitions starts May 17.

To further the scholarly exchange among the newly-formed Food Security Working Group, a campus-wide initiative to support researchers in the food security space, CSBS invites Illinois faculty, staff, and students interested in food security research to join us for a brainstorming session on “What would be the most interesting or promising project to collaborate on?” Registration is required. 

This event will focus on Generative Models and investigate how they can synthesize increasingly realistic and useful electronic health record data, including images, sounds, and videos. We will discuss deep generative model frameworks, their applications, and the risk of generative AI and its potential positive economic impact in accelerating healthcare-related predictive model development.

UIUC faculty and researchers are invited to a showcase of cutting-edge research and services offered by NCSA and discover the exciting, new campus investment in research computing. Engage with NCSA’s distinguished researchers and affiliates, explore potential collaborations and share your research interests and needs. Complimentary lunch and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Register by April 5!

NCSA welcomes Brian DeMarco for a presentation on quantum computing. Quantum computing is an emerging priority area for NCSA and the Center has submitted plans – currently under review – to deploy an early quantum computing system in the next few years. So please join us for discussion on NCSA and UIUC’s quantum journey as well as complimentary coffee and cookies! A Zoom option is available.

Five Days for Change will be held May 22-26, 2023 on campus. Participants attend a week-long intensive training program for campus staff and faculty designed to strengthen knowledge and skills to promote equity, while building networks with colleagues from across campus. Come together to learn how to make change on campus. Meals and educational materials provided. Registration closes May 8.

Formerly Celebration of Women Faculty at Illinois, the 2023 Women in the Academy: Boldly Shaping a Better Illinois is a networking luncheon for tenure-stream and specialized faculty members at Illinois. We welcome faculty colleagues who wish to learn and engage in conversations on the impact of faculty women at Illinois. Please click here to RSVP.

The Storytelling Series features faculty who teach, employ, and develop novel qualitative research techniques. Our next session, What Do Rollercoasters, Bicycles, Airplanes, Puzzles, Elephants, and Misnomers have in Common? My Methodological Journey, features Dr. Jacinda Dariotis, Director of the Family Resiliency Center. This event is offered in-person and on Zoom. Registration required.

Join us for Conversation Cafe + Friday Forum as we welcome Ken Salo, Urban & Regional Planning in a dialog on Building Anti Racist Immigrant Communities: Reflections on Arts Mediated Dialog Projects.  A free lunch will be offered to attendees.  Conversation Café is part of the OVC for Student Affairs, Lunch on Us series and is paid for in part, by SCPF.   

Not all heroes wear capes, but some edit Wikidata. Join us March 30th and 31st to enrich digital records about BIPOC comic book characters and BIPOC creators. Drop-ins welcome! No prior Wikidata experience required. Hosted by Graphic Possibilities and co-sponsored by the Comic Book Reading Group and the HRI Research Cluster on the Social Lives of Digitized Culture at the University of Illinois.

Join Jaime Hernandez, assistant professor at Marquette University, as he presents via Zoom at the Spring 2023 Kent Seminar Series Thursday, March 23, from 2-3 p.m. (CT). This semester we honor the legacy of Paul Kent with a special alumni series. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided beginning at 1:30 p.m. in the ICT Classroom. 

The Asian American Cultural Center is planning for the 4th annual South Asian American Leadership Conference (SAALC) on April 8, 2023. We are looking for leaders interested in directing and facilitating 50-min workshops for the conference and/or simply registering to attend! Learn more about the event at go.illinois.edu/saalc. For any questions, feel free to email us at aacc@illinois.edu.

Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, will present "Inclusive speech technology" at the Beckman Institute Director's Seminar at noon on Thursday, March 23 in 1005 Beckman and on Zoom. Lunch will be provided. Registration is required to attend.

The 2023 Leighton Lecture on Ethics and Leadership will feature Sylvia Puente speaking on “An Economic Powerhouse: Strengthening Leadership with the Latino/a/x Community.” Puente is President & CEO of the Latino Policy Forum, a nonprofit that works for equity, justice, and economic prosperity on behalf of Latinos in Chicago.

Divisions that associate informality with disorganization, chaos and criminality, still structure how economies in the Global South, and women's work within them are routinely represented, despite convergences worldwide in precarious working conditions. Join Professor Mullings as she discusses informality, precarity, and the coloniality of gendered labour in the Carribean.

Our next MillerComm will be March 27th with Professor Lin Foxhall at the Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum at 4:00 pm. For more information, please click here.

This month's theme is featuring the bilingual story in Japanese and English, When the Sakura Bloom. In Japan, spring is one of the most iconic seasons. Why? Cherry Blossoms, of course! When the Sakura Bloom sheds light on the cultural importance of cherry blossoms and how the people of Japan see cherry blossoms. This is a story about change and how change is important in our lives.

Mei Mei finds her grandpa practicing tai chi in the garden. “Wow, it will be fun if grandpa teaches me that!”. However, it seems that tai chi is harder to master than it seems to be. Don’t worry! Mei Mei has her own way to deal with the challenge. She decides to teach her grandpa yoga that she learnt at school instead! Come to listen to this story and try your own tai chi and yoga moves!

Are you interested in applying your foreign language skills to aid in national defense? What does it take to be a Language Analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA)? What’s the work like? Join Jenny Weber, NSA Language Outreach Lead, for an information session to explore potential learning opportunities and career paths at NSA. Info Session: 3:30-4:30 pm. Walk-in Coffee Hour: 4:30-5:30 pm.

Winners in each level will be awarded with a gift card and those who are currently taking or have taken KOR classes within a year will be eligible to compete in the Midwest Korean Speech Contest to be held on Sat, Apr 1, 2023. The 1st place winners at each level in the Midwest Korean Speech Contest will be awarded with a tuition-free opportunity to study in Korea in summer and a cash award.

Attend this upcoming lecture by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University). Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latine epistemes, media environments, cultural theory and artistic practice. This talk is part of the Interseminars event series. 

Mark your calendar for “What's a Derivative, Anyway? Un/doing Old English Translation through Indigenous Language Revitalization," a lecture presented by Tarren Andrews (Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University). This event is part of the Un/Doing Event Series.

Paul Selvin, Professor of Biological Physics at Illinois, will give a Frontiers in Miniature Brain Machinery lecture on “Live Brain Slices & Neurons at Nanometer-Resolution” in person and on Zoom. Attendance is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program.

Tim Clark, associate Professor of Public Health Sciences, Neurology, and Data Science, at the University of Virginia, will present Timothy Clark's Talk on Evidence Graphs and AI/ML Explainability. We continue the CIRSS speaker series in Spring 2023 with a focus on “Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing”. 

This talk examines language and nation in South Asia. The speakers establish an imbricative relationship between ‘matra-bhasha’ (mother tongue) and ‘matra-bhumi (mother land) both of which, had to be rescued from the colonial dominance.   

With the many responsibilities involved in academia, it can be difficult to keep everything organized. Organization of tasks and projects can assist with getting things done in a timely manner and help reduce stress by providing more time for activities outside of work and school. We will review areas of organization for students, researchers, and anyone who want to improve their organization. 

Web of Science is the widest-scoping, multidisciplinary platform of abstract databases for full-text articles, books, and conference proceedings. We will highlight how to search for literature and authors, where to find citation tracking data and grant information, refining and managing search results, analyzing citations, and unpacking item records.

We invite you to join us on Zoom this Wed. for an exciting talk by Dr. Michele Ramsey on how to change our perceptions about conflict, the role of power in conflict, emotional labor, self-care in response to emotional labor, how those in power can help mitigate the impacts of emotional labor in the workplace, ways leaders can support marginalized employees and more.

Illinois instructors, including grad teaching assistants, are invited to join We CU Community Engaged Scholars, OVCDEI, and IHSI to explore how racism and social injustice can emerge in service learning classrooms. Participants will discuss ways to minimize racism in volunteer and service work and walk away with strategies to incorporate anti-racist practices in their classroom. 

Raksha Mudar, director of Graduate Studies in Speech and Hearing Science, is the guest speaker at the next F&S Diversity & Inclusion Committee event. She will speak on ways to boost brain health--a timely topic during Women's History Month as women are more likely to develop dementia. Join us on Wed., March 22, at noon. Register for login info: https://go.fs.illinois.edu/diversityandinclusion. 

Join NCSA Research Scientist Matthew Krafczyk for an online training session March 22 at 3 p.m. to help users to get started with deep learning projects on HAL, the hardware accelerated learning cluster at NCSA. Students will leverage their knowledge across multiple ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch and Sklearn to build new models, optimize them and compare them across frameworks. Sign up!

Join IHSI for the first session of the 2023 Achieving Equity Series: Disparities in Substance Use 3-part series March 21 at 10:30 a.m. Panelists will discuss how North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University researchers are addressing health disparities and creating a campus NIDA team and research proposal, and their campuswide approach to substance use and mental health treatment.

International Student and Scholar Services will be hosting Spring Names Trainings on Monday, March 27th and Wednesday, March 29th.  Learn Chinese and Farsi name pronunciations from native speakers!  Trainings will be offered via Zoom.  Please register at: https://forms.illinois.edu/sec/1966444431. 

Hear from alumni Tracy Drake and Raquel Flores-Clemons as they discuss their work with Project STAND (STudent Activism Now Documented), and the Blackivists, a collective of Black archivists who prioritize Black cultural heritage preservation. This is a zoom only event, and will be recorded. Register to receive the zoom link the morning of the event: https://uiuc.libcal.com/event/10378908

Join us for the Spring 2023 University of Illinois Press Publishing Symposium. Panels will cover transforming your dissertation into a book and everything you ever wanted to know about book series. Learn more and register for the individual panels here:https://www.press.uillinois.edu/symposium/spring23symposium.html

Join us for our CMI event on March 29th, 7 pm with Christopher Benson. This presentation will be zoom only. Please register here. For more information, please click here.

Lea Peck, Senior Assistant Director of Social Media and Digital Strategy for the University of Illinois, will be presenting the March Web Con workshop: "10 reasons why Airtable is your MVC—Most Valuable Coworker." Join us on Zoom to see demonstrations on building collaborative campaigns, creating social media content calendars, setting up email messaging approvals, and more. 

Please join us for Episode 5 of the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) speaker series sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. This week, Michael Twidale, professor of Information Sciences, will offer a provocative talk about meta-ethics: what to do when we think that our ethical processes themselves may be..unethical?

Does a healthy weight always mean a healthy body? Not necessarily. The causes of obesity are complex, and weight-centered interventions have shown mixed results for health promotion. Explore the complexity of obesity and discover what we know so far from weight-centered health interventions.

Mim Rahimi, Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, will highlight new ideas for R&D of electrochemical carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is essential if global warming mitigation scenarios are to be met. However, today's maturing thermochemical capture technologies have exceedingly high energy requirements and rigid form factors that restrict their versatility and limit scale.

Join the Slavic Reference Service and the Language Workshop at Indiana University for the next installment of the Research and Language Learning series. On March 23 we are featuring Dr. Marianne Kamp who will be giving a talk entitled "Learning to Listen in Uzbek: Oral History and Language Proficiency." For more information and to register, please visit: https://forms.gle/Lz15p4ua3efrfrebA.

Looking for adults aged 21-64 years with high weight for height to participate in a study into prolonged sitting and how adults think. The study involves 3 visits to Freer Hall, wearing activity monitors, and screening. Measures include cognitive tests, electroencephalography, a body scan, maximal exercise test, and blood draws. Compensation up to $350.Click here if interested!

Participants needed for a study about a new medication management app designed for older adults with mild cognitive challenges. Participants must be age 60+, have mild problems with memory, thinking, or concentration, take medications for hypertension or high cholesterol, use a smartphone, and speak and read English. Participants will be compensated. If interested, contact nila@illinois.edu. 

Recruiting healthy adult males ages 18-30 who have no ear/hearing disorder, no speech/language disorder, no neurologic disorder, are right-handed, speak English as their first language, and are non-smokers. We study how activity of the eardrum and inner ear relates to hearing in noise. Study involves a lab visit (2.5 hours max, compensation: $5 per 30 min). E-mail hearingresearch@illinois.edu.

The RAD-WEAR study is recruiting adults (18+) enrolled in STEM fields at UIUC. Participants will attend two in-lab sessions (3-4 hours each) and will be sent home with two wearables for two, 2-week remote data collection sessions. Measures include various wearable devices (electroencephalography, electromyography, etc.), cognitive tests, etc. Compensation for up to $300. Click here if interested!

Do you subscribe to at least one media streaming service (e.g., Netflix?). Are you 18-62 years old? We're exploring streaming media use and perceptions about advertising. This study involves one 30-minute Zoom interview with a member of our research team. Participants will receive a $10 Amazon gift code. Email Prof. Michelle Nelson nelsonmr@illinois.edu if interested.

We are seeking to interview professionals who work with older adults about how to measure older adults’ fulfillment, well-being, happiness, or social engagement. This interview takes about 90 minutes, and you will be compensated with a $30 Amazon gift card. We can conduct the interview in-person or via Zoom call. For more info, please contact Varitnn at vh9@illinois.edu or phone at (217) 300-5445.

The iCONS research study involves 7 2.5-hour visits & a daily gummy for 9 months.  Activities include height, weight, & eye health measurements, reading & math related questions, computer tasks, & parent questionnaires. Families will receive up to $370 with parking provided. To learn more, email iconstudy@illinois.edu or schedule a screening call to check eligibility using our scheduler link.