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Meet Our Faculty
Professors in LAS are setting the curve and advancing knowledge.
It's a simple but impressive fact about life at the U of I. The professor teaching our classes and running our labs may be a National Medal of Science recipient, a MacArthur "Genius" Award honoree, a prize-winning novelist, or even a world renown expert in number theory, a field that underlies much of computer science.
- Our faculty includes recipients of Nobel and Crafoord Prizes, the National Medal of Science, the Spendiarov Prize of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Hubbell Award, the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, as well as Guggenheim, Sloan, and Fulbright Fellowships.
- Academic staff are members in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Our faculty includes two-time winners of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching U.S. Professors of the Year Award
- Over the decade, LAS professors have received more than 25 campus awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Meet just a few of these distinguished faculty
Molecular and integrative physiologist Albert Feng developed an intelligent hearing aid that filters out background noise.
At a dig in the Czech Republic, anthropologist Olga Soffer discovered the earliest evidence of textiles, pushing their emergence back more than 7,000 years.
Bruce C. Berndt has received mathematics' highest awards. But his most prized achievement is his decades–long quest to prove the claims left in the "lost notebooks" of Ramanujan, one of India's greatest mathematicians.
Frederick Hoxie, one of the nation's foremost scholars in Native American history, explores how cultures are preserved.
Sociologist Jennifer Hamer, is expanding our understanding of how low-income African American families negotiate work, kin care, and family in poor urban communities.
Chemist Ken Suslick, along with Neal Rakow, developed an artificial nose that works better than the real one by visualizing odors. It is one of this prolific scientist's many discoveries.
Entomologist May Berenbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 1984, the organizer of the U of I annual Insect Fear Film Festival.
Prize–winning novelist and Swanlund professor of English Richard Powers is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award and the National Book Award.
Microbiologist Carl Woese, a recipient of a Crafoord Prize, is recognized for his discovery of a third major division of life, the archaea. He is a member of the Royal Society, and has also received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award and a National Medal of Science.