This week’s 5 Questions Friday features Travis Johnson, TSM alum and current academic advisor and instructor for ETMAS and TSM in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

What motivates you in your work?

URBANA, Ill. – It’s 6 a.m., and Nick Tarleton is on a bus with 20 or so university students. They’ve just left Oak Brook, Illinois, and they’re headed to their first stop of the day on their behind-the-scenes tour of the food and beverage processing industry in the Chicago area.

Tarleton calls out, “What are you most excited to see today?” Inevitably, someone answers back, “How do you have so much energy?!”

URBANA, Ill. – The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences Alumni Association has announced the dates for the 2022 ACES Family Academies. The family-friendly experience will be held July 14-15 on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

URBANA, Ill. - Doris Houston’s experience growing up in Chicago, and the influence of her family, “planted the seeds” of her passion for equity, diversity and inclusion, a passion that would take her from a legislative internship to championing diversity at the university level.

This week’s 5 Questions Friday spotlight shines on an alum who remains very connected to campus, but in ways he might not have imagined. In addition to a host of other roles, Dr. Michael Smith serves as an emergency medicine physician.

What is your agriculture background?

URBANA, Ill. – In the center of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) campus at University of Illinois, look up and you’ll see a massive, hexagon-shaped building, recognized for its gorgeous interior and well-loved study spaces with lush, green views of south campus.

That scene of the ACES Library, Information, and Alumni Center (LIAC), against the background of bright blue Midwestern skies, is iconic these days. But just two decades ago, the land LIAC stands on was an empty parking lot.

URBANA, Ill. – Every one of Stacy Zuber’s career goals centered on science. That doesn’t mean she took a direct path.

“In middle school, I was certain I wanted to be a veterinarian. I learned quickly that I didn’t like the sight of blood, so I tried biochemistry,” she says. “If had done an internship instead of working on the family farm during the summer, I would have seen what was really out there and made up my mind earlier.”

Dozens of ACES alumni returned to the University of Illinois campus in September to celebrate the impacts of an international internship experience and reconnect with a mentor, professor emeritus Lowell Hill.

For over two decades, agricultural economics students under Hill’s supervision covered the globe to shed light on practices and standards in international grain trade.

When she began her studies at the University of Illinois, Rachel Janovsky would not have pictured herself working for an international aircraft manufacturing company. A 2018 graduate of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES), Janovsky has been able to leverage her College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) degree to ensure the health and safety of employees at Honda.

Once an Illini, always an Illini. This maxim is more than an expression of alumni loyalty for Dave Shockey (Ag Science, ’80; Law, ’83). It is a way of life.