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LAS FACULTY RESEARCH BULLETIN

DEAN, COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES

Lisa A. Freeman

MANAGING EDITOR

Vicki Bolf

DESIGNER

Katie Klema

PHOTOGRAPHER

Katie Klema

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS AND EDITORS

Anna Brailovsky

Luke Hanley

Jane Rhodes

Anne Eaton

Beth Allen

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Welcome from the Dean

LISA A. FREEMAN

Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Welcome to the Spring 2026 edition of the LAS Faculty Research Bulletin.

Many of you have heard me say before that one of the best parts of my job as Dean is learning about and advocating for the many impressive initiatives, studies, and investigations undertaken every day by LAS faculty. In uncertain and unsettling times, I am comforted by the knowledge that the faculty in LAS continue to set the bar high in research achievements, funding, and honors, as you’ll see in the pages that follow.

On the STEM side of the College, our junior faculty continue to shine. Andy Nguyen in Chemistry and Philip Engel in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science recently received prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships. These awards acknowledge early-career researchers whose accomplishments particularly distinguish them. With only 126 fellowships this year, distributed across seven fields, this is indeed impressive news!

Our humanities, social science, and interdisciplinary faculty are also raking in the accolades. Jon Connolly, Nermeen Mouftah, Cindy Tekobbe, and Karen Underhill have all won national prizes for their recent books. And our faculty are well-represented in the campus-level research and teaching awards, too, as you’ll read below. It is wonderful to see our faculty research achievements shine brightly across our campus. Our collective impact as a faculty is clearly immense.

As always, thank you for being part of our LAS community. I hope you enjoy reading the Spring 2026 Faculty Research Bulletin as much as I have.

Yours,

Lisa A. Freeman Dean

Honors & Awards

JON CONNOLLY

Connolly, Associate Professor of History, won the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies for his book WorthyofFreedom:IndentureandFreeLaborintheEra ofEmancipation. The prize is awarded annually for the best book published anywhere by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies since 1800.

DANNY MARTIN

Martin, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction (College of Education) and Mathematics, was elected to the National Academy of Education. The National Academy of Education is an honorific society of U.S. members and international associates elected based on outstanding education-related scholarship. Their mission is to advance high-quality education research and its use in policy formulation and practice.

Mouftah, Associate Professor of Anthropology, received the Jackie Kirk Book Award from the Comparative and International Education Society for her book Read inthe Name ofYourLord. The award recognizes an exceptional book published within the past two years that reflects one or more of Jackie Kirk’s core areas of commitment, particularly gender and education and/or education in conflict, post-conflict, and fragile contexts.

NERMEEN MOUFTAH

JANE RHODES

Rhodes, Professor of Black Studies and Associate Dean of LAS, has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a 214-year-old national research library and community of learners dedicated to discovering and sharing a deeper understanding of the American past. Elected for their achievement in academic or public life, AAS members come from across the United States and seven other countries. Since the Society’s founding in 1812, fourteen United States presidents, more than seventy-five Pulitzer Prize winners, scores of Bancroft Prize winners, many Guggenheim fellows, and several MacArthur Award winners have been elected to membership.

MARGARITA SAONA

Saona, Professor in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, has been selected to join the distinguished delegation of writers representing Peru at the 50th Anniversary of the International Book Fair of Buenos Aires. The International Book Fair of Buenos Aires stands among the most influential cultural events in the Spanish-speaking world, welcoming more than a million visitors each year.

CINDY TEKOBBE

Tekobbe, Assistant Professor of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies, received the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 2026 Research Impact Award for her book IndigenousVoicesinDigitalSpaces. The award is presented annually for the empirical research publication in the previous two years that most advances the mission of the organization or the needs of the profession.

KAREN UNDERHILL

Underhill, Associate Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies, received the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures for her book Bruno Schulz and GalicianJewish Modernity.The prize is awarded biennially for an outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the Slavic languages.

SLOAN RESEARCH FELLOWS

Two LAS researchers this year to receive the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. The two-year $75,000 fellowships are awarded annually to early-career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

PHILIP ENGEL

Engel, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, researches the Hodge Conjecture – one of the seven renowned Millennium Prize Problems – which aims to understand complex curved geometric objects by examining simpler linear objects called Hodge structures. Specifically, Dr. Engel is investigating how these objects degenerate.

ANDY NGUYEN

Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, will investigate evolvable peptide porous materials. Peptide assemblies are believed to be the ancestors of proteins and are critical for understanding how proteins developed their chemistry, which can guide the design of advanced materials for health and sustainability. The goal of Dr. Nguyen’s research group is to investigate whether synthetic peptide assemblies behave and evolve like proteins.

Earth and Environmental Science Students Jocelyn Wagner, Carrie Gorman, Arianna Telles working in The

Matzen Lab

Grants & Fellowships

JENNIFER BRIER

Brier, Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies, has received $55,000 to participate in The Renewal Project – a coalition of universities, faculty, students, and community partners dedicated to exploring and addressing university-driven urban renewal projects beginning in the 1950s and 60s that displaced poor people, primarily people of color, from their neighborhoods. The Renewal Project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by the University of Minnesota. The UIC team will collaborate with community partners on the Near West Side and West Side of Chicago to develop relevant courses, workshops, historical tours, and exhibitions.

JORDI CABANA-JIMENEZ

Cabana-Jimenez, Professor of Chemistry, received $57,218 from Argonne National Laboratory, funded by the US Department of Energy, for the project “(Electro)chemo-Mechanical Characterization of Electrode-Electrolyte Interfaces In Batteries,” which aims to create more refined composite ceramic-polymer electrolytes to meet the needs of high-energy density battery applications. The award will support the work of two PhD students in the Department of Chemistry.

YIQUN CHEN

Chen, Assistant Professor of Economics, has been awarded $51,367 by the Rockwool Foundation – a Danish non-profit foundation that supports research to reinforce the social and economic sustainability of the welfare society. Dr. Chen’s project, “Public Policies and the Integration of Vulnerable Populations into the Danish Health Care System,” examines the role of public and health policy in mitigating major inequalities in health and socioeconomic outcomes for immigrants and women. The work will focus on the impact of assimilation policies on the immigrant-native gap in health and on the role of gender match between physicians and patients in improving the outcomes of female patients suffering from mental health disorders.

Evdokimov, Professor of Physics and Director of Graduate Studies, is leading the next phase of the ongoing collaboration between UIC’s High Energy Nuclear physics (HENP) group and other eRD112 institutions focused on developing advanced detector technologies for the Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr. Evdokimov’s team has received $32,000 from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility-Jefferson Lab (funded by the US Department of Energy) to continue work on the “Advancement of the Design of the ePIC Hadron Endcap AC-LGAD based Time of Flight (TOF) Detector.”

ROSILIE HERNÁNDEZ

Hernández, Senior Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs, has received $149,957 from the Circle of Service Foundation to implement the “First-at-LAS Career Champions Program,” which aims to substantially improve student professional preparation from first-year enrollment to graduation, increase retention rates, and enhance post-baccalaureate career success. The program will provide a menu of instructional asynchronous modules and on-campus workshops for faculty and students focused on the relationship between academic and career competencies in a liberal arts and sciences context.

NAN JIANG

Jiang, Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded $601,124 by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research for his project “Probing Surface Plasmon-Induced Chemical Reactions at the Angstrom Scale.” Chemical reactions such as bond formation and dissociation assisted by the localized surface plasmons (LSPs) on noble metallic nanostructures hold great promise in solar-to-chemical energy conversion and heterogeneous catalysis. To help harness the full potential of these reactions, this project will determine the mechanistic pathway of nano-confined plasmons and their impact on reactive sites and apply this understanding to engineer the plasmon-induced chemical reaction at a single bond level.

ROBERT KLIE

Klie, Professor and Head of Physics, has secured $335,206 from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) administered by the Army Research Office. The funds will be used for “the Acquisition of a TERAprint T Series Printer to Enable Next-Generation Battery and Graphene Liquid-Cell Research.”

Macias-Rojas, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies, has been awarded a research grant of $74,966 from the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) for her project “From Justice to Security: A Study of the Long-term Effects of Border Security on Access to Justice in Transborder Communities Along the U.S.-Mexico Border.” The work will explore the lived experiences of Mexican immigrants, U.S.-born Latinos, and the Indigenous population in three U.S.-Mexico borderland communities over the past twenty years. The project builds on her prior ethnographic pilot studies that were also supported by the RSF.

PATRISIA MACIAS-ROJAS

LAWRENCE MILLER AND PRESTON SNEE

Miller, Associate Professor of Chemistry and co-PI Snee, Associate Professor of Chemistry, are part of a large-scale collaborative project led by the University of Nevada Reno called “Transforming Tuberculosis Diagnosis in Low-Resource Settings with Advanced Quantum-Dot Sensors,” which received $5,000,000 from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Track program. The project addresses the persistent need for reliable and affordable technology for early detection of disease that can spread rapidly to others. The research team, which consists of two industry partners (InBios and C2Sense) and several academic institutions (University of Nevada Reno, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and Duke University), will develop and commercialize a sensor system that meets internationally accepted standards for sensitivity, cost, speed, and ease of use in healthcare contexts for the early detection of tuberculosis. UIC will receive $299,014 for the work led by Drs. Miller and Snee.

NILESH SALKE

Salke, Research Assistant Professor of Physics, received $365,596 from UChicago Argonne LLC for the project “Optically Detected Magnetic Resonance (ODMR) Microscopy.” Dr. Salke will lead the development of ODMR microscopy to image the Meissner effect in superconducting samples studied at high pressures in diamond anvil cells. The microscope will be designed as a portable instrument to be used at various APS beamlines side-by-side with existing laser heating and XRD setups for synthesis and structural characterization of super-hydride samples.

DONALD WINK, AVIA ROSENHOUSE-DANTSKER AND DUNCAN WARDROP

Wink, Professor of Chemistry, together with Rosenhouse-Dantsker, Clinical Associate Professor of Chemistry and Wardrop, Associate Professor of Chemistry, have been awarded $1,996,908 by the National Science Foundation for the project “Facilitating Undergraduate Success and Professional Development of Talented, Low-Income Students.” The funding comes through the NSF’s S-STEM program, which provides awards to fund scholarships, and implement curricular and co-curricular activities that support student success in academic and career pathways. The project will support 44 UIC students in their pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry with annual scholarships and cohort-building activities, including student success workshops and courses and a suite of career development opportunities.

Zak, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, received a $40,000 Pilot and Feasibility grant from the Diabetes Research and Training Center at the University of Chicago for his project “Diet-induced regulation of sensory processing in the olfactory epithelium.” The research team, which includes Drs. Pingwen Xu and Terry Unterman from the UIC College of Medicine, will use state-of-the-art genomic sequencing methods to reveal how food intake, diet, and pharmaceutical interventions, including glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) analogs, regulate the transcriptional profile of the olfactory epithelium. Building on these studies, the team will use in vivo functional imaging of the olfactory epithelium to reveal how food-associated odorants are represented in neural populations responsible for detecting and evaluating nutritive substances. This research has the potential to lead to therapeutic and preventative avenues that alleviate the need for systemic pharmaceutical interventions in obesity and diabetes.

JOSEPH ZAK

BASIC LIFE SCIENCES

Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Awards

RUIXAN GAO

Rising Star: Assistant Professor, Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry

HUMANITIES, ARTS, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE

JONATHAN CONNOLLY

Rising Star: Associate Professor, Department of History

MOGILNER

Distinguished Researcher: Professor, Department of History

MARINA

SOCIAL SCIENCES

CEDRIC G. JOHNSON

Distinguished Researcher: Professor, Departments of Black Studies and Political Science

FACULTY MENTOR OF THE YEAR

Professor, Departments of Black Studies and Sociology, Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy

AMANDA E. LEWIS

2025 Office of Technology Management Proof of Concept Award

PHASE II AWARDEE

Professor of Chemistry and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research (STEM)

ProjectTitle:“Thesigma-2receptorasa targetforNiemann-PickTypeC”

STEPHANIE COLOGNA

2025-2026 Teaching Recognition Program Award

Lecturer in the Department of English

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences

Clinical Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science

EMAN ELTURKI

MICHAEL MILLS

MICHAEL MULLER

ANTHONY WOLDEIT

2025-2026

Silver Circle Award

Senior Lecturer, Psychology

Senior Lecturer, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science WILL ASH

ADRIAN BARKAN

Senior Lecturer, Physics

ALESSANDRA PASSAROTTI

JULIA KIM-COHEN

JAIRA HARRINGTON

Assistant Professor, Black Studies

BAO BUI

Visiting Lecturer, History

2025 Community Engagement Faculty Award

Associate Professor of Disability and Human Development (College of Applied Health Sciences) and Gender and Woman’s Studies

AKEMI NISHIDA

LAS Faculty Research in UIC Today

Professor Danny Bernard Martin Elected to National Academy of Education

DANNY MARTIN, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND MATHEMATICS

UIC journalism students prepare for AI-integrated future of news

MIKE REILLEY, SENIOR LECTURER IN COMMUNICATIONS

Two UIC researchers earn prestigious 2026 Sloan fellowships

PHILIP ENGEL, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS, AND ANDY NGUYEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY

UIC researchers image near-roomtemp superconductors

ABDUL HASEEB MANAYILMARATHAMKOTTIL, A CHEMISTRY PHD STUDENT IN PROFESSOR RUSSELL HEMLEY’S LAB

UIC biochemists advance 3D brain mapping

RUIXAN GAO, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND CHEMISTRY

UIC scientists recreate the universe’s first moments by slamming together oxygen ions

AUSTIN BATY, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS

ANNA GUEVARRA, PROFESSOR OF GLOBAL ASIAN STUDIES

Energy Department funding extends UIC, Fermilab partnership

ROBERT KLIE, PROFESSOR AND HEAD OF PHYSICS

University Scholar Anna Guevarra

Thanks to the work of UIC researchers, five Vietnam War MIAs come home

JOHN MONAGHAN, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY