Dr. Bir Bahadur (BB) Singh, a distinguished alumnus of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, passed away on July 29, 2024, in his hometown in India.

When Danika Ford learned about the environmental impacts of fast fashion in high school, she started looking for college programs combining traditional environmental science with social science to understand how human motivations, behaviors, and policies affect environmental problems and solutions. 

The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is launching a comprehensive brand platform project to define and amplify the college’s identity, building upon the university’s broader branding efforts led by Chancellor Robert J. Jones.

In the bright, friendly classrooms at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Child Development Laboratory (CDL), you’ll see infants, toddlers, and preschoolers playing and taking part in activities designed to stimulate young minds. But children aren’t the only ones learning — students and faculty from across campus use the facility as a critical tool for teaching and research, fulfilling a mission that sets the CDL apart from lab schools nationwide.

The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is entering the new academic year with significant growth, welcoming both its largest freshman class in 50 years and a talented cohort of faculty members. This fall, the college has promoted 11 faculty members and added 14 new faculty, further enhancing its academic, research, and outreach capabilities.

Midwestern soils are among the most productive in the world, thanks in part to extensive tile drainage systems that remove excess water from crop fields. But water isn’t the only thing flowing through tile drains. Nitrogen moves along with soil water into drainage ditches, streams, and ultimately into the Mississippi River Basin, where the nutrient contributes to massive algal blooms and hypoxic conditions that impact aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Today, MicroMGx celebrates the opening of its new research facility at the University of Illinois Research Park, part of the Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing (iFAB) Tech Hub, which is a testament to rapid advancements and increasing investment to realize agricultural innovations through precision fermentation.