Faculty honors

Erik Nelson, molecular and integrative physiology, has received the 2025 Laureate Award from the Endocrine Society. The honor, given to 14 leading endocrinologists, is the most prestigious in the field. 

Matthew Winter,  political science, has been named the Leslie A. Watt Professorial Scholar.

Mariselle Meléndez , Spanish and Portuguese professor, has named the 2025  Frances O’Connell Endowed Faculty Scholar.

Kimberly Mack, English, has been named the 2025 Aaron and Laurel Clark Scholar. 

Soo Ah Kwon, Asian American studies, has been recognized as the 2025 Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar.

Jamie Jones, English; Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, comparative literature and religion; Mirelsie Velázquez,  Latina/Latino studies; and Roderick Wilson, history and East Asian languages and culture, have been named the 2025 Conrad Humanities Scholars.

Daniel Cooney, mathematics; Jeremiah Heller, mathematics; Wei Wei, actuarial sciences and risk management; Amanda Young, mathematics; and Ruoqing Zhu, statistics, have been named the 2025 Brad and Karen Smith Scholars.

Adrian Burgos, Jr., history, has been named the 2025 Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar.

Marianne Alleyne, entomology; K. Decker French, astronomy;  Christopher Kempf, English; Alexa Kuenstler, chemical and biomolecular engineering; Rebecca Oh, English; and Gan Zhang, climate, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences, have been recognized as the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholars.

Alexa Kuenstler, chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received a 2025 School of Chemical Sciences Teaching Award. The award recognizes her exceptional educational efforts, from course development to in-class instruction. 

Kate Clancy, anthropology, has been awarded the 2025 APEX award of excellence for her article, “Biology is Not Binary” (2024).

Hong Yang, chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The fellowship is the highest professional award conferred by the society and recognizes his outstanding contributions to the chemical sciences.

Erik McDuffie, history and African American studies, has been awarded the Jon Gjerde Prize by the Midwestern History Association for his new book “The Second Battle for Africa."

Damien S. Gurionnent, Simon A. Rogers, and Diwakar Shukla, chemical and biomolecular engineering, have been named James W. Westwater professorial scholars. This award recognizes their unique excellence and research in their field.

Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, climate meteorology and atmospheric sciences, received the Paul Crutzen Publication Award for his paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics on using climate model simulations to show that the 2023 spike in global surface temperatures were primarily driven by natural phenomenon El Nino Southern Oscillation.

Nicholas E. Jackson, chemistry, has been named the 2025 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. This honor recognizes the research and teaching careers of young faculty and will aid in funding the Jackson lab which focuses on a chemically transferable coarse-grained electronic structure model for polymers. 

Travis Dixon, communication, has been recognized as the 2025 U of I Black Faculty and Professional Alliance Trailblazer. This award honors path-breaking accomplishments made by Black faculty and staff over the past year.

Janice Harrington, English, has received the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. The award rewards literature dedicated to deepening our understanding of race and diversity.

Stephan Link, chemistry, has been named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This award recognizes scientists and innovators nominated by their peers for their scientifically and socially distinguished accomplishment.

Charles E. Sing, chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been selected to receive the 2025 Owens Corning Early Career Award from the Materials Engineering and Sciences Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. This award recognizes outstanding independent contributions to the scientific, technological, educational, or service areas of materials science and engineering.

Rachelle Grossman (pictured), comparative and world literature, Amy Hassinger, English, Simi Kang Asian American studies, Daniel Nabil Maroun, French and Italian, and Mirelsie Velázquez, Latina/Latino studies, have been named Humanities Research Institute Fellows for the 2025-26 academic year.

Mikael Backlund, chemistry, has received the NSF CAREER Award for his research proposal exploring spectroscopy and quantum information. His proposal combines theory and experiments to determine the quantum information limits of single-molecule spectroscopy which could lead to advancements in the areas of health, defense, and energy.

Angad Mehta, chemistry, and Lisa Olshansky, chemistry, were awarded with Sloan Fellowships. The fellowships recognize awardees that are the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward.

Nicholas E. Jackson, chemistry, has been selected as a 2025 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

Catherine Murphy, chemistry, received the 2025 NANOSMAT Prize Award.  She will give a lecture at the 16th NANOSMAT Conference in Naples, Italy, this summer.

Janice Harrington, English, will be inducted into the 2025 Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in March 2025.

Prashant Jain, G.L. Clark Professor of Physical Chemistry, has been selected to receive the 2025 Craver Award by the Coblentz Society.

Nicholas Jackson, chemistry, has been selected to receive The Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry Award. He will deliver the Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry Lecture at the American Chemical Society Spring 2025 Meeting.

Renee L. Baillargeon, professor emeritus of psychology, will receive the 2025 Kurt-Koffka Medal from the Department of Psychology at the University of Giessen in Germany this July at an award ceremony in Germany.

“Reader, I” by Corey Van Landingham, English, contains poems of a speaker who is in her first years of a marriage as she courts and eschews nuptial myths and finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, and in something beyond the self. (Sarabande Books)

“Enlightenment Anthropology: Defining Humanity in an Era of Colonialism,” by Carl Niekerk, Germanic languages and literatures, probes the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, foregrounding how the knowledge transfer between an international array of natural historians and public intellectuals shaped the emerging discipline and its central debates. (Penn State University Press)

“Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music,” by John Paul Meyers, African American studies, examines the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past.
(University Press of Mississippi)

“Reparations and Reparatory Justice,” co-edited by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, history and African American studies, contains works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world for people of African descent. (University of Illinois Press)

“Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism,” by Waïl S. Hassan, comparative literature, highlights the representation of Arab and Muslim immigrants in Brazilian literature and popular culture since the early 20th century, revealing anxieties and contradictions in the country’s ideologies of national identity. (Oxford University Press)

“A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South,” by Maria Angela Diaz, history, offers an original and valuable analysis of the complicated ways in which race, movement, and geopolitics intersected to shape the history of the Gulf and the United States’ understandings of empire during the Civil War era. (University of Georgia Press)

“Inka Bird Idiom,” by Claudia Brosseder, history, shows how the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. (University of Pittsburgh Press)

“Bribed with Our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era,” by Dave Beck, history, recounts how the U.S. government coerced American Indian nations to accept termination of their political relationship with the United States. (University of Nebraska Press)

Emily Van Duyn, communication, has been selected to participate in the 2024 Faculty Institute facilitated by the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Diwakar Shukla, chemical and biomolecular engineering has received the 2023-2024 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research. 

Theresa Schoetz, chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received the POLiS Award of Excellence for Female Researchers.

Stephen Nesbitt, professor and head of the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, has been named a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Erik Nelson and Lori Raetzman (pictured), molecular and integrative physiology, have been chosen to receive the Laureate Awards from the Endocrine Society, the top honors in the field.

Reuben May, the Florian Znaniecki Professorial Scholar and head of the Department of Sociology, has been selected for the 2024-2025 President’s Executive Leadership Program.

Ying Diao, chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ 2024 Allan P. Colburn Award for Excellence in Publications by a Young Member of the Institute.

Eric Calderwood, comparative and world literature, and Bobby Smith II (pictured), African American studies, will receive the 2024 Humanities Research Institute Prize for Research in the Humanities, in the faculty category. 

Lisa Olshansky, chemistry, has been selected by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar for 2024. She is one of 18 scholars named for the year and will receive an unrestricted research grant of $100,000.

Huimin Zhao, professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering, received the 2024 Charles D. Scott Award from the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology.   

Paul Kenis, director of the School of Chemical Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry for his work in microfluidics and gas diffusion electrodes, and electrocatalytic CO2 reduction.

Both Kelly Findley, a teaching associate professor of Statistics, and Xun Yan (pictured), associate professor of Linguistics, received Provost’s Initiative on Teaching Advancement awards. These grants enable recipients to design, implement, and assess instructional and pedagogical innovation that has a high probability of enhancing education at Illinois. 

Ying Diao, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, received the 2024 Owens Corning Early Career Award from the Materials Engineering & Sciences Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Diao was cited for “fusing molecular assembly with surface science to reveal unconventional mechanisms of surface-induced nucleation, and creating innovative, scalable printing methods for nanomaterials manufacturing.”