Over the past decade, more than 200 international students have been introduced to the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois through the International Student Immersion Program (ISIP) coordinated by the ACES Office of International Programs. ISIP helps ACES maintain and facilitate strategic partnerships with key international universities, identifies potential graduate students, and serves as a bridge for cultural understanding, for both the visiting students and their hosts at Illinois.

After an engaging set of interactions in South Africa over the summer, several faculty from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) are planning new collaborations with colleagues from the University of Pretoria and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Agronomy professionals from around the world converged at the Crop Sciences Research and Education Center’s South First Street facility on August 26 for in-field presentations and opportunities to interact with ACES faculty.

The event is hosted biannually to coincide with the Farm Progress Show in Decatur. Most of the attendees hailed from Brazil and Argentina.

URBANA, Ill. – Corn, soybean, and cotton farmers shudder at the thought of Palmer amaranth invading their fields. The aggressive cousin of waterhemp – itself a formidable adversary – grows extremely rapidly, produces hundreds of thousands of seeds per plant, and is resistant to multiple classes of herbicides, including glyphosate.

URBANA, Ill. – Ten-day numbers are in, and undergraduate enrollment in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois continues to rise, adding to a record-breaking year of enrollment at U of I.  

New freshman enrollment in the College of ACES is at 538 for fall 2019, compared to 512 at this time last year, with 2,801 total undergraduate enrollment for the college in fall 2019, compared to 2,631 last year.

With the goal of advancing the understanding of the neurochemistry of addiction, the Neuroproteomics and Neurometabolomics Center on Cell-Cell Signaling at the University of Illinois has had its funding renewed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with a $6 million grant. Animal sciences professor Sandra Rodriguez-Zas runs the Bioinformatics, Data Analytics, and Predictive Modeling Core of the center.

Read more from the Beckman Institute.

John Bowman (Ph.D. Plant Pathology ’84) recently received the “Outstanding International Horticulturalist” award from the American Society of Horticultural Science. This award recognized Bowman’s lifetime of achievement in international horticulture. He currently serves as a program area leader in the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Agricultural Research and Policy.

URBANA, Ill. – Bacterial leaf streak, a foliar disease in corn, has only been in the United States for a handful of years, but Tiffany Jamann says it’s a major problem in the Western Corn Belt.

URBANA, Ill. – Nitrogen from agricultural production is a major cause of pollution in the Mississippi River Basin and contributes to large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Illinois and other Midwestern states have set goals to reduce nitrogen load through strategies that include different land management practices. A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in Journal of Environmental Management, uses computer modeling to estimate how those practices may be affected by potential changes in the climate, such as increased rainfall.

URBANA, Ill. – Researchers and policymakers are increasingly looking at paternity leave for its potential positive impacts on families and societies. Changes in cultural values, including a deeper understanding of the importance of fathers’ involvement with families have prompted some countries to pursue social policies encouraging fathers to be more involved in the care and raising of children.

While the effects of maternity leave on the mother and the children have been widely studied, less research has been done on paternity leave.