Researcher Spotlights


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George Chacko

George Chacko is Research Associate Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Executive Director of Research Analytics at the Grainger College of Engineering. His research interests span scalable clustering methods, novelty in science, research impact, knowledge diffusion, historiography, and the structure and formation of research communities. His research is supported by by awards from the National Science Foundation and the Illinois:Insper Partnership. His work has also been supported by cloud computing awards from Oracle and Google. Another source of computing is the Illinois Computes program.

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Ryan Larsen

Ryan is a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology. He has used MRI in a variety of experiments relating brain measurements to cognitive performance, cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and nutrition status. Ryan also develops new methods for the collection and analysis of MRI data.

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Chris Dietrich

Chris Dietrich is Principal Research Scientist, Curator of Insects and Illinois State Entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, Prairie Research Institute, and Graduate Faculty member in the School of Integrative Biology, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the biodiversity and evolution of leafhoppers, treehoppers and related hemipteran insects, which include many agricultural pests and vectors of plant pathogens.

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Bryan M. Reiley

A graduate student at the University of Illinois / Illinois Natural History Survey, Reiley is working on his PhD in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. His recent work found population declines of Swainson's warblers following catastrophic flooding events.

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Heidi Imker

Heidi Imker is the Director of the Research Data Service at Illinois and an Associate Professor at the University Library. Prior to joining the Library, Heidi was the Executive Director of the Enzyme Function Initiative, a large-scale collaborative center funded by the National Institutes of Health. Heidi holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois and did her postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School. Her current research focuses on understanding and improving data management, sharing, and archiving practices.

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Yuanxi Fu

Yuanxi Fu is a PhD student in Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a BS in chemistry from Nanjing University in China, a PhD in chemistry and a MS in bioinformatics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on argumentation in science.

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Lindsay Clark

I am a plant geneticist with particular interests in polyploidy, population genetics, and the development of novel algorithms and software for the analysis of molecular markers. I am currently a research specialist in the lab of Prof. Erik Sacks in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I study genetic and phenotypic diversity of Miscanthus, a perennial grass used for bioenergy and biomass, and have made discoveries about its evolutionary history in the wild and in cultivation.

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Sam Stickley

Sam is a PhD candidate working in Jennifer Fraterrigo's landscape ecology lab in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. He earned his B.S. degree from Colorado State University and M.S. degree in Environmental Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Sam is interested in prioritizing conservation efforts, and his current research involves the use of geospatial datasets to predict microclimate for use in species distribution modeling of plethodontid salamanders in southern Appalachia.

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Avery Mickalide

Avery was born in Maine and received his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois in 2019. After traveling for half a year and then living at home, he moved to Silicon Valley to start a job as a computational biologist and founded the organization STEM Strikes for Peace (stemstrikesforpeace.org).

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Qian Zhang

Qian Zhang is a joint postdoc across the iSchool, NCSA and RDS. She is also a computational scientist and oceanographer in Physical Oceanography. Her multidisciplinary research covers quantitative data analysis and visualization, high performance computing (HPC), numerical/mathematical modeling and simulations of atmosphere-ocean dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Qian published the data from her PhD dissertation about the computational study of hydrodynamics in the Wax Lake Delta

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Cory Suski

Cory Suski is a professor in Natural Resources and Environmental Science. His lab group does work related to all aspects of fisheries conservation, with topics that include the impacts of climate change on fishes, how angling can shape individual fish and fish populations, and trying to control the spread of invasive species.

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Ryan Corey

Ryan is a PhD student with Professor Andy Singer in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research is on array signal processing and audio signal processing with a particular emphasis on augmented listening technologies such as hearing aids. He is developing wearable arrays with dozens of microphones to improve listening in noisy environments.

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Yushu Xia

Yushu Xia is a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. with Professor Michelle Wander at UIUC. Her research lab utilizes field, lab, and remote sensing datasets along with modeling tools to monitor soil health, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecosystem productivity. Her finer-scale research aims to help farmers improve precision agriculture, while her broader-scale research aims to benefit policymaking by improving the accuracy and reducing the uncertainty of estimates associated with ecosystem services.

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Sara Benson

Sara is a lawyer with ten years of experience teaching at at the University of Illinois College of Law. Prior to joining the College of Law, she worked both in a large international law firm and a small boutique non-profit law firm. Currently, Sara is the Copyright Librarian at the University Library at Urbana-Champaign. The ultimate goal of her research agenda is to shape the future of copyright policy by examining both on-the-ground practice in libraries and museums and the socio-political guiding principles behind such practices.

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Megan Konar

Megan Konar is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof Konar's research focuses on the intersection of water, food, and trade. Her research is interdisciplinary and draws from hydrology, statistics, and economics. Her research group is passionate about creating new data that can help researchers, decision-makers, and the general public better understand their food and water systems.

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Spencer D. C. Keralis

Dr. Keralis is Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian. Their research crosses disciplinary boundaries to examine labor ethics and applied social justice principles in digital scholarship and librarianship. They were principal investigator for the TX-Gender Project, and the Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library Project, which explored the professional development needs of librarians to deliver inclusive services for transgender and gender creative patrons.

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Chris Wiley

Chris received his MSLS from Florida State University with a concentration in Information Architecture. Before joining the University Library, he was a librarian at NOAA Miami Regional Library. Chris joined the University Library in 2013 and is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Data Services Librarian. His research focuses on data management practices, the implementation of data services programs, and uses of institutional repositories.

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Jeffrey Kwang

Jeffrey Kwang is a graduate student studying fluvial geomorphology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering under Professor Gary Parker. He studies how landscapes evolve over geologic time by using both physically-scaled and numerical models. His goal is to determine and understand the fundamental processes that are necessary to create the structure of landscapes and drainage networks that we see here on Earth.

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Devin Edmonds

Devin Edmonds is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences working in the Population and Community Ecology (PaCE) lab with Dr. Michael Dreslik. His research focuses on understanding the ecology of threatened species to inform conservation efforts. For his dissertation, he is studying the endangered Malagasy poison frog Mantella cowanii as part of a conservation action plan for the species.

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Jodi Schneider

Jodi is Assistant Professor of School of Information Sciences (iSchool), where she teaches classes in Information Organization and Access as well as in Information Modeling. She also affiliates with Infomatics; Beckman Institute; Health Care Engineering Systems Center; the European Union Center; and UIC Department of Psychiatry. Her research focus including: Linked data (ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web); argumentation and evidence; scholarly communication; knowledge organization; computer-supported cooperative work; biomedical informatics; science of science.

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Rebecca Smith

Dr. Smith is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, a Health Innovations Professor at the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, and a member of the Infection Genomics for One Health theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Her research focuses on using mathematical and statistical modeling with complex data sets to improve disease control programs, with a special interest in One Health and infectious diseases. She has also served on the scientific leadership team for SHIELD, the COVID-19 control program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Loren Merrill

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey working with T.J. Benson (Avian Ecologist, INHS) examining the influence of different land-cover types on the health and condition of shrubland birds. Prior to joining INHS, I did a one year postdoc with Jennifer Grindstaff at Oklahoma State University examining the impacts of early-life stressors on short and long-term trait expression in zebra finches. I conducted my PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara on life-history strategies and ecophysiology of blackbirds. I am an avid birder and nature photographer and am happiest when immersed in wild places.

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Bernarda Calla

Bernarda is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Entomology / School of Integrative Biology at the laboratory of May Berenbaum. She uses next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics to understand the evolution of herbivory, detoxification mechanisms, and the effects of natural and human-made toxins in insect genomes

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Zhiheng Lyu

Zhiheng is a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Qian Chen’s group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her current work is combining precision synthesis of nanocrystals with cutting-edge operando characterization to understand and develop advanced nanomaterials for energy applications.

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Michael Lotspeich-Yadao

Michael is a Research Specialist in the School of Social Work and earned his Ph.D. in Applied Sociology at Baylor University. As a rural sociologist and demographer, he is interested in how the spatial and temporal modeling of ecological conditions can explain contemporary social problems. Michael currently uses geospatial datasets to provide analytical bandwidth to Illinois agencies that reflect the diversity of our state's communities.

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Tandy Warnow

Tandy is the Founder Professor of Engineering. Her primary appointment is in Computer Science, but she is a member of many other departments and programs at the U of I. She received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011. Her research areas are: bioinformatics and computational biology; machine learning and statistical inference; and discrete algorithms on big data.

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Carmen Ugarte

Carmen is a Research Specialist, Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Biology at NRES. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of soil management practices on soil quality and function. She is especially interested in studying the dynamics of soil food webs and their influence on soil ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and the regulation of population densities of deleterious soil organisms. Her work includes basic and applied research at different scales in the regional and national levels in agronomic and natural systems.

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Elena Andrea Pelech

Elena is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Genomic Biology who studies the physiological plasticity of crops related to photosynthesis under dynamic and steady-state light conditions in both controlled and field environments using gas exchange techniques to improve photosynthetic efficiency and global food security.

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Greg Spyreas

Greg Spyreas is a plant ecologist and botanist with the Illinois Natural History Survey. His research area is applied ecology that aims to bring about better conservation, restoration, management, monitoring, and understanding of natural areas and their floras/faunas, especially those of Midwestern North America. Greg published data from a longitudinal assessment of milkweed populations in the Illinois landscape and possible correlations with monarch declines.