Feeding an ever-growing human population is one of the major grand challenges we face — especially with the impact agriculture can have on climate change. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers and partners in Singapore are taking a novel approach to this challenge: creating food building blocks at the microbial level.

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day. But it was beyond important for Henry Leung, PHD ’75 ACES, and Cecilia Tsun-Tai Jen Leung, MS ’71 ACES, PHD ’74 ACES, back when they were international graduate students—he from Hong Kong, and she from Taiwan.

ONE MINUTE, wheelchair racer Susannah Scaroni, ’14 ACES, MS ’22 ACES, was pushing through a normal long training session, heading east on Windsor Road not far from campus. The next, she was moving ahead much more quickly than she expected.

It was early morning on Sept. 16, 2021. A month before, Scaroni had been in Tokyo for the Paralympics, where she won a gold medal in the 5,000 meters and a bronze medal in the 800 meters.

New research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has linked multiple types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”) with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases in postmenopausal women.

Junior year of high school, Lia sat in chemistry class, listening intently to Mr. Ahring describe the building blocks of proteins. A few hours later, she experienced this same lesson in her food science class. The connection between foods and chemistry? Amino acids. This epiphany and a sit-down pep talk with her chemistry teacher ignited a flame that would catalyze her journey to food science. 

Early childhood is an important time for learning about nutrition and establishing healthy eating behaviors. Young children rely on parents to provide food options, and the availability of food in the home affects their dietary choices.

March is National Nutrition Month™, an educational and informational campaign sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. This year’s theme is “Beyond the Table,” encouraging people to think about nutrition from farm to fork, including food production and distribution to grocery stores and farmers markets.

Leafy green vegetables are important sources of dietary fiber and nutrients, but they can harbor harmful pathogens. In particular, lettuce has often been involved in outbreaks of foodborne illness across the U.S.

The drug finasteride, also known as Propecia or Proscar, treats male pattern baldness and enlarged prostate in millions of men worldwide.

 Zeynep Madak Erdogan, Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) Associate Director for Education and Sylvia D. Stroup Scholar of Nutrition and Cancer, received the prestigious 2024 Michael B. Kastan Award for Research Excellence given by the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) Molecular Cancer Research (MCR) journal.