Month: December 2016

Bernardo Vazquez Bravo is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Engineering focusing on drinking water disinfection. As part of the Smart Water Disinfection project, he is working to understand more precisely how widely-used modern virus inactivating methods like chlorine and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation treatments work. He and the team want to know the exact change a […]

Allison Gardner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Entomology researching the effects of habitat quality on the reproduction of mosquitoes. In particular, she studies how different species of leaves caught in a storm drain — a favorite breeding place for mosquitoes — can help or hurt efforts to control the population of the disease-carrying insects. A single leaf can […]

Andrew Mackay is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Entomology with a broad interest in arthropods and public health. He joined Associate Professor Brian Allan’s lab in 2012, just as Allan was starting to turn his mind toward human-made stormwater infrastructure and how it interacts with disease-carrying insects. The traditional storm drain that […]

As part of the iSEE-funded Stormwater and Mosquito Control Project, Medical Entomology Ph.D. student Elijah Juma is examining how decaying leaves in stormwater affect the habitats — and the life cycles — of mosquitoes. In Summer 2016, Elijah undertook his first field season under the direction of project PI Brian Allan, an Associate Professor of […]

Stuti Shrivastava is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Plant Biology, and alongside more than 20 student and faculty researchers at the University of Illinois, she is working to create crops in silico — computer modeling that will accurately predict plant responses to environmental changes. In a world where climate change already affects many people’s […]

Erik Stanek is a Masters student in Illinois’ Crop Sciences program. As a member of the Agroforestry for Food project funded by iSEE, he’s determining the role mixed-species farms of trees and shrubs may play in the future of central Illinois agriculture — and in feeding the nation. The core idea of agroforestry is relatively […]

Kevin Wolz is a Ph.D. student in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (PEEC). At the Agroforestry for Food site, a project seed-funded by iSEE, he is most interested in the possible benefits of mixed-species cropping. Instead of planting just one species of nut- or fruit-bearing tree on any given […]

Ron Revord is a Ph.D. student studying plant breeding and genetics. Specifically, he focuses on the development of a new variety of hazelnut tree that will thrive and be profitable in mixed-species agricultural systems. A featured plant in many of the test plots at the iSEE Agroforestry for Food project’s research site, the hazelnut can be an important […]