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Drug-delivering aptamers target leukemia stem cells for one-two knockout punch
Drug-carrying DNA aptamers can deliver a one-two punch to leukemia by precisely targeting the elusive cancer stem cells that seed cancer relapses, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign report.The aptamers — short single-strand snippets of DNA that can target molecules like...
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Alumnus Taeghwan Hyeon receives Illinois International alumni award for exceptional achievement
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois International named chemistry alumnus Taeghwan Hyeon (Seoul National University), Sharifa Sultana (Illinois), Colby Silvert (University of Maryland), Illinois graduate student Mehrdad Mohammadi, and Illinois undergraduate student David...
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Juan Velásquez (PhD, '11) is living his dream of impacting lives through science
Juan Velásquez vividly remembers that Saturday in June 2006 when he first wandered onto the quad on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus as a new graduate student in chemistry.Less than 24 hours after landing in the wide-open Champaign County landscape dominated by corn and...
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Stephan Link named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Chemistry Professor Stephan Link is one of three faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have been named 2024 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Link...
Alumni and Friends Reception, March 2025
The Department of Chemistry hosted its bi-annual networking reception on Sunday, March 23, 2025, in conjunction with the opening day of the ACS National Meeting in San Diego.
New modern instructional lab in 215 Noyes Laboratory
Renovations are now complete, and crews are installing equipment in a 6,000-square-foot area on the second floor of Noyes Laboratory that features two state-of-the-art instructional laboratories th
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Two postdoctoral researchers awarded the Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award
Two postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Chemistry have been awarded the 2025 Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award: Dr. Chieh-Kai Chan, a postdoctoral researcher in Martin D. Burke’s group, and Dr. Josseline Ramos Figueroa, a postdoctoral researcher in Wilfred van der Donk’s group.The...
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Chemistry postdoctoral researcher wins back-to-back Science Image Challenge titles
For the second consecutive year, Xiaolin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry, submitted a science image that has been selected the winner of the Main Category in the School of Chemical Sciences Image Challenge.
Liu conducts research in chemistry professor...
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Charles Schroeder, Jeffrey Moore, and collaborators receive $1.8 M NSF grant to develop self-replicating materials
Abiotic, or nonliving, self-replicating materials are often a topic of science fiction — but researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to synthetize materials that self-replicate, the same way...
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Mikael Backlund receives NSF CAREER Award for proposal exploring spectroscopy and quantum information
Mikael Backlund, assistant professor of chemistry, has received a 2025 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for a research proposal combining theory and experiments to determine the quantum information limits of single-molecule spectroscopy which could lead to advancements in the areas of...