My experience working with ADMI this semester was extremely eye-opening. When I took on this eight-week internship in March, I knew it would be a challenge. The final semester of my senior year was already filled with exciting and time-consuming activities. This included another internship with the Champaign 5^th & Hill neighborhood rights campaign and a job working as a contact tracer with Champaign Urbana Public Health District.

Woah – you must have read the title of this blog post and thought, “Say what? Essential oils can kill bacteria?” Well, our Global Food Security Scholar Research Project – investigating the effectiveness of essential oils at inhibiting the growth of Salmonella in water – provides evidence to support this claim.

Freshman year can be extremely stressful, especially when you’re at such a huge school like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My high school was relatively small compared to most, so the transition from 1,500 students to over 30,000 students during my freshman year was not easy at first. Being a senior now and having had time to grow accustomed to campus, I’ve learned a few things about college and campus that I wish I had known my freshman year.

You can make the campus smaller.

A recent news item reported a “digital divide” between urban and rural high school students in Illinois due to few computer science course offerings in schools outside Chicagoland. Given the state’s workforce development needs in this area (around 14,000 unfilled positions requiring computer skills at the time of the study), it is concerning that the educational gap not only exists, but is growing.

Greetings, and happy fall semester! Campus is abuzz with excitement as students, faculty, and staff re-engage in face-to-face activities. It is wonderful to hear “I-L-L I-N-I” again.

Over the summer of 2021, I was able to participate in a virtual internship in Cape Town, South Africa with VA Corps, where I collaborated with public health leaders and nonprofit organizations in the field of HIV/AIDs relief and education.

Although this wasn’t my original plan for the summer of 2021 (I would have preferred an in-person study abroad experience), I believe the circumstances that brought upon this experience were unchangeable and I found the program, nonetheless, to be extremely valuable to both my personal and academic aspirations.

When Dr. Germán Bollero became interim dean for the College of ACES in late September, he left a vacancy in the Office of Research. Fortunately, Dr. Alex Winter-Nelson agreed to step into the role of acting associate dean for research and director of the Agricultural Experiment Station. But Winter-Nelson's shift left an opening in the Office of International Programs. With her expertise in international development, Dr.

My name is Lauren Moy and I am a first-year pharmacy student at University of Illinois Chicago College of Pharmacy. I am from the city of Chicago, so going to this school meant I was able to come home. I graduated from the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May 2021.

Vanessa Cahill, an ACES graduating senior in ACE, majoring in policy, international trade and development, delivered this December’s ACES convocation speech. She said, "Due to the pandemic, I was unable to study a semester abroad as planned during my time at Illinois. This pushed me to buckle down and finish my degree by December to take a few months and explore new parts of the world before starting work. If ACES has shown me one thing, it is the endless opportunity in this industry. That being said, I am not limiting myself to working in America.

The ACES community is filled with passionate people – some in the spotlight and some behind the scenes. They care about and focus on world-changing work like: