WUN Program Showcase
Units across the Illinois campus are partnering with the WUN to lead programs that help shape global partnerships, broaden student experiences, generate innovative new research, and launch the Illinois brand on a trans-national scale. These collaborations are at the heart of the WUN's mission and we showcase each program below, in addition to featuring stories from participants and an event archive to showcase your ground-breaking work.
Please post information on your program online through our form.
Units across the Illinois campus are partnering with the WUN to lead programs that help shape global partnerships, broaden student experiences, generate innovative new research, and launch the Illinois brand on a trans-national scale. These collaborations are at the heart of the WUN's mission and we showcase each program below, in addition to featuring stories from participants and an event archive to showcase your ground-breaking work.
Please post information on your program online through our form.
Women and Gender Studies
The Women and Gender in Global Perspectives (WGGP) Program has partnered with the WUN to bring in distinguished guest lecturers like Wu Qing and Ruth Pearson, to address such issues as social entrepreneurship, global gender roles, and women's work in Asia. The WGGP's involvement with and support from the WUN has encouraged WGGP Director, Gale Summerfield to create international collaborations and joint research agendas with several global partners. Expanding on their work with AEL, the WGGP is now building a network with several WUN partners to examine global gender aspects of the sustainable biofuels and food security debate.
WUN Entrepreneurship
WUN Global Enterprise is a pioneering platform that provides a connection point to identify issues, stimulate initiatives and motivate leaders to deliver enterprise skills and practices in global business and social environments, to expand the impact and effectiveness of entrepreneurship in higher education.
The Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Illinois has been instrumental in helping to launch the WUN Enterprise initiative, develop its strategic mission, and Tony Mendes and Kimberly Sugden serve on the WUN Enterprise Steering Committee. We aim to provide global entrepreneurship resources to faculty, students, and staff across the world. The WUN has also partnered with the Academy's flagship student organization, Entrepreneurs Without Borders, to expand social entrepreneurship to students on an international scale.
Spintronics
Spintronics has the potential to be one of the most exciting and challenging areas in nanotechnology, important to both fundamental scientific research and industrial applications. Within the context of spin-electronics, the electron spin, as well as the charge, is manipulated for the operation of information processing circuits, based on the fundamental fact that electrons have spin as well as charge. These spintronic-devices, combining the advantages of magnetic materials and semiconductors, are expected to be non-volatile, versatile, fast and capable of simultaneous data storage and processing, while at the same time consume less energy. They are playing an increasingly significant role in high density data storage, microelectronics, sensors, quantum computing and Bio-medical applications etc.
It is expected that the impact of spintronics to the microelectronics industry might be comparable to the development of the transistor 50 years ago. However, the multi-disciplinary nature of spintronics would require a joint effort of a group of institutions with expertise in electronics, material science, physics and computer science etc. There are more than ten WUN universities with strong research groups in spintronics and related area. This project will bring together expertises in several different disciplines and will carry out collaborative research area. A multi-disciplinary approach as proposed in this project might be the key to achieve major breakthroughs in this exciting but challenging area.
Spintronics Steering Committee Member - November 2005-present:
Jean-Pierre Leburton
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Beckman Institute
WUN New Directions in Ancient Biomolecules Group
The WUN sponsors the New Directions in Ancient Biomolecules group, which is focused on understanding the preservation of organic molecules and residues in bones and artifacts. This emerging field is known as biomolecular archaeology, and it includes research on ancient DNA, and the chemical and isotopic composition of ancient tissues and residues. Among the main objectives of studying these materials are (1) understanding tissue and molecule degradation, (2) reconstructing human diets, (3) reconstructing ancient environments and environmental change, and (4) determining human and domestic animal migration patterns.
The leader of this WUN network, Matthew Collins, based at the Archaeology Department of York University, visited Professor Stanley Ambrose UIUC in Spring 2007 to set up closer collaboration with the Environmental Isotope Paleobiogeochemistry Laboratory (Anthropology Department UIUC), and to develop research proposals. As a result, a proposal for “Lactase Persistence and the early cultural history of Europe” (LeCHE) was funded this month by the Marie Curie Initial Training Network (UK) in March.
Read our Annual Biomolecules WUN Report
Medieval Studies
There is a strong record of collaboration between faculty and doctoral students from UIUC and various WUN universities. Since 2002 a steady stream of graduate students from Illinois have gone to the UK and students from the UK have come to work with medievalists at Illinois. The benefits to our students are clear from the reports that they give upon their return.
Over the course of this exchange, research relationships between faculty and students at our institutions have deepened. As a result of discussions during visits and at conferences, Professors Anne D. Hedeman and Karen Fresco organized a conference, “Collections in Context” at Illinois in 2007, that included WUN affiliated scholars Peter Ainsworth (Sheffield) and Craig Taylor (York) in a session focussed on a magnificent manuscript anthology, the Shrewsbury Book.
Discussions during this conference produced the idea for a web-based project centered on this manuscript that would draw in the collaboration of staff at NCSA (Peter Bajcsy): an interdisciplinary study of an illuminated manuscript given in 1445 to a French princess who was to marry King Henry VI of England. This manuscript is a collection of a range of literary texts and books of advice. A proper understanding of this unique source can only be achieved through a team of scholars in Art History, Literature and History, drawn from across the WUN network. This collaborative research will be built on a web-based digitized reproduction of the manuscript and will produce an annotated site usable for teaching. We have submitted grant proposals to the NEH/JISC competition, to the NSF, and to the NCSA UIUC Faculty Fellowship Program.
Thus the WUN exchange has not only resulted in a new research initiative that will develop new e-tools for virtual manuscript study, but will also involve our students in cutting-edge research, enhance the Program’s visibility, and give us the opportunity to generate outside funding. Finally, as an outgrowth of UIUC participation in the collaborative interdiscipliniary research project on “Multilingualism in the Middle Ages” the Program in Medieval Studies, together with the new Center for Translation Studies at Illinois, is organizing an international conference on “Translating the Middle Ages,” which will involve academic sessions and, thanks to generous support from the Chancellor, an evening at the Krannert Center with major poets W.S. Merwin and Robert Pinsky reading from and discussing their translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Among the distinguished medievalists who have agreed to participate in this conference are two contributors to the WUN project on multilingualism. This conference will thus strengthen the link to further collaboration.
eLearning and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Through a partnership with GSLIS and Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite, the WUN has launched a series of six workshops on eLearning, held across UK Universities. Illinois faculty have presented research and eLearning topics at this seminar series, and have greatly benefited from the international collaborations and research that has resulted.
Additionally, the WUN’s support for these seminars and workshops has made it possible for the University of Illinois to garner support for a collection of eLearning papers – many written by presenters who collaborated after the seminar series – addressing the state of the art in eLearning. In 2007, this collection appeared as the Sage Handbook of E-Learning Research.
Cultures and Linguistics - Language Reform
The WUN support for our project on Language Reform has helped build the international team for the study of prescriptivism in linguistics. Language, like many patterns of social interaction, has both rules and creativity, the restraining influence of social requirements for communication and the innovative actions of the individual agent. Both of these are natural processes subject to scientific investigation, but depending on the dominant ideology of the period, one or the other has often been considered “unnatural” and outside the realm of science.
In this project we study in a scientific manner one of the types of linguistic behavior most often condemned as unnatural: the prescription of usage by grammarians, teachers and other self-designated experts on language. The WUN allows us to bring together experts from France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, so that we can examine both the nature and the effectiveness of language reform.
