FSHN

The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a catalyst for collaborative research projects across engineering and agriculture. With a strong record of team-building for large long-term interdisciplinary research and education projects at the University of Illinois, CDA continues to offer a competitive seed-funding program. The newly announced collaborative projects span two or more of the Center’s initial themes: automation, data, animals and crops, and people.

URBANA, Ill. ­–The Division of Nutritional Sciences graduate training program at the University of Illinois received a $150,000 Higher Education Challenge Grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to jumpstart development of courses as part of a proposed new certificate program focused on food/ feed regulations and nutrition policy. The new program will prepare graduate students for leadership positions in industry and government.

URBANA, Ill. — Compared with adults, children and adolescents are less sensitive to the sweet taste and need 40% more sucrose in a solution for them to detect the taste of sugar, a new study found. Read more from Illinois news Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. - Sharon Donovan, professor and Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Diet and Health at University of Illinois, will assume the role of director of the newly established Personalized Nutrition Initiative (PNI).

The PNI is a partnership between the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U of I.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — From tweeting photos of delicious meals to reviewing restaurants, social media give foodies numerous opportunities to indulge their passion for edibles. But these media and other digital communications — including recipe websites and food-delivery apps — also generate a rich trove of text data for food scientists and food industry researchers to study what people eat, how nutrition affects health and many other food-related topics. Read more from Illinois News Bureau.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Faculty and staff members and graduate teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this spring were honored for excellence in teaching, mentoring and advising, collectively known as Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction. Read more.

A global team of more than 500 researchers, including many experts in smell and taste perception, is investigating the abrupt loss of smell and taste – called anosmia and hypogeusia, respectively – in association with COVID-19 and whether these symptoms could help predict patients who may have the disease and could be at risk of being contagious.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) was awarded a $335,005 grant from the Agricultural Transformation Initiative (ATI) to address malnutrition in Malawi. SIL’s nutrition team is housed in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

URBANA, Ill. — A diet including daily avocado consumption improves the ability to focus attention in adults whose measurements of height and weight are categorized as overweight or obese, a new randomized control trial found. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted the 12-week study, published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Read more.

URBANA, Ill. — Being distracted by technology during mealtime may decrease the amount of food a person eats, nutrition scientists suggest in a new study.

When 119 young adults consumed a meal while playing a simple computer game for 15 minutes, they ate significantly less than when they ate the same meal without distractions, said lead author Carli A. Liguori.