Gene Robinson

UPDATE: The Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has selected six papers published by PNAS in 2022 to receive the Cozzarelli Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Papers were chosen from more than 3,200 research articles that appeared in the journal last year and represent the six broadly defined classes under which the NAS is organized.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has committed another round of funding to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead the second phase of its Bioenergy Research Center — one of four large-scale DOE-funded research centers focused on innovation in biofuels, bioproducts, and a clean energy future for the country.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been chosen to co-lead the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago—a new biomedical hub—with researchers from Illinois, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. The three-university team was selected as part of a competitive application process (https://www.czbiohub.org/) for a research initiative explicitly focused on measuring human biology.

The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology recently held a town hall meeting to introduce new changes to improve diversity and inclusion at the IGB. Attendance was high, with faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and students alike filling both meeting rooms to capacity in order to ask questions and weigh in on proposed changes.

In light of long-standing inequities in STEM representation, many universities are now recognizing the value of diversity in higher education. Achieving such diversity involves creating an inclusive campus that welcomes scholars from different backgrounds, not only to foster a healthy intellectual environment, but also to provide role models to aspiring students. Faculty cluster hiring is an emerging practice in higher education, involving cross-campus collaborations to hire faculty working on interdisciplinary research topics.

On February 25^th 2022, the Illinois General Assembly adopted House Resolution 0690, commending the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology on its 15^th year of societal, scientific, and scholarly contributions at the intersection of science and society.

The Earth BioGenome Project, launched in November 2018, is an ambitious undertaking with the goal of sequencing all the existing, named eukaryotes—about 2 million species of fungi, plants, and animals—in a 10-year timeframe. The project was highlighted in “The Earth BioGenome Project: The Launch of a Moonshot for Biology Special Feature” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The chronic stress of living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence and poverty alters gene activity in immune cells, according to a new study of low-income single Black mothers on the South Side of Chicago.

An unusual study that involved bar coding and tracking the behavior of thousands of individual honey bees in six queenless bee hives and analyzing gene expression in their brains offers new insights into how gene regulation contributes to social behavior.

Bees and humans are about as different organisms as one can imagine. Yet despite their many differences, surprising similarities in the ways that they interact socially have begun to be recognized in the last few years. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, building on their earlier studies, have experimentally measured the social networks of honey bees and how they develop over time.