This year, Champaign County 4-H’er Austin Ater celebrated his 14th birthday in an extraordinary way — by giving back.

If you ate, filled your gas tank, took medicine, or did laundry today, you likely participated in the bioeconomy. That’s the part of the economy that taps as its source material living, growing things.

Darin Joos, Crop Sciences Research Agronomist, has been named a 2025 Chancellor’s Staff Excellence Award recipient.

Joos began his Illinois career in 1994 as a graduate student and went on to lead the state’s crop variety testing program, which evaluated commercial varieties of corn, wheat, and soybean at 14 sites across Illinois. After nearly three decades in that role, he now manages the Crop Sciences Research and Education Center farms in Champaign.

With a strategic location in the Indian Ocean and a tropical climate that allows for year-round cultivation of diverse crops, the island country of Sri Lanka provides valuable opportunities for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students to learn, compare, and collaborate on topics of food and agribusiness management.

The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ann

A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows, for the first time, that severe flu infection in pregnant mice leads to a breakdown in placental and brain barriers and an accumulation of potentially harmful molecules in the fetal b

Illinois once harbored more than 8 million acres of wetlands. By the 1980s, all but 1.2 million wetland acres had been lost, filled in for development or drained to make way for agriculture. Now, thanks to a 2023 Supreme Court decision, roughly 72% of the remaining 981,000 acres of Illinois wetlands are no longer protected by the federal Clean Water Act, putting communities at risk of losing the flood control, groundwater recharge, water purification and natural habitat these wetlands provide, researchers report.

The undergraduate program in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign