The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) welcomed back alumnus Allan P. Mustard, a retired ambassador and accomplished Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) professional, to present the annual ACES Distinguished International Lecture.

The newly named director of the first ever Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), Haley Oliver, engaged her audience by asking a question everyone had to answer in the affirmative: “Have you ever had diarrhea?”

Usually an uncomfortable inconvenience for most of us in the developed world, foodborne illnesses such as Norovirus, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, and toxoplasmosis kill 420,000 people annually. Thus, Oliver’s work puts food safety at the core of food security.  

URBANA, Ill. – The United States is the world’s leading producer of soybean and the second-leading exporter. Nearly 90% of oilseed production in the U.S. comes from soybean. A biological threat to soybean crops in America could affect the global economy, and the result could be devastating to the American soybean farmer, according to researchers in the USAID Soybean Innovation Laboratory (SIL), housed in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new tool uses an interactive database of geographic and genetic information to help authorities quickly identify where the confiscated tusks of African elephants were originally poached.

Developed by an international team of researchers, the Loxodonta Localizer matches genetic sequences from poached ivory to those stored in the database. It relies on genetic information from a small, highly variable region of mitochondrial DNA from African elephants.

College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences student Austin Schorfheide, a sophomore majoring in agricultural economics with a concentration in public policy and law, has been selected as a 2019 Cargill Global Scholar. He is one of three University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students to be selected for the program this year.

The prestigious Cargill Global Scholars Program, a distinctive international scholarship program that began in 2013, offers a scholarship award of $2,500 per year for up to two years.

URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) recently launched Africa’s first free, open-access, certificate-based online course in integrated pest management (IPM) and pesticide safety.

Insect pests, weeds, and diseases are common problems for farmers worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, pest control is typically manual, which is labor-intensive and often ineffective.

URBANA, Ill. – World leaders convened for the UN Climate Summit in September amid dire projections of climate instability. The problem is multifaceted, of course, but a recent IPCC report identifies deforestation as the main driver of land-based greenhouse gas emissions, which comprise almost a quarter of all human contributions to climate change. What if more people around the world could be paid to keep forests healthy and intact?

URBANA, Ill. – A team including scientists from the University of Illinois has identified the ways in which glyphosate-resistant waterhemp has emerged in corn and soybean fields in southwestern Ontario.

URBANA, Ill. – Humanitarian engineering projects often focus on bringing western technologies to non-industrialized societies. But environmental and cultural factors in these locations may be very different from conditions in the West, and the projects may not meet client needs if engineers do not fully understand the context in which they are operating.

Today, as world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly, hundreds of emerging leaders focused on fighting global inequality came together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s third annual Goalkeepers event in New York City.