The immune system is the major line of defense against infection. Ryan Langlois uses innovative approaches to study immune responses to viral infections and vaccines. Viruses continue to emerge from animal reservoirs driving novel pandemics in humans. He has also designed new model systems that track viruses from reservoir through transmission into new hosts. By perturbing components of the immune system, the Langlois lab uncovers how viruses make the species jumps and evolve leading to new pandemics.

How are violence and communication related? This question guides Dr. Harris’s internationally recognized research on assault, sexual consent, and systemic racism. She analyzes how everyday interactions, such as two people discussing a traumatic experience, sustain or transform institutional inequities. She also assesses how organizations’ decisions and policies impact abusive interpersonal encounters. In 2019, Oxford University Press published her first book, Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses.

Lana Yarosh is a Computer Scientist with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing. Her research lab has made significant contributions to the empirical understanding and design of computing systems that enhance social relationships to create stronger families, support individual health and wellbeing, and provide a stage for personal growth. Lana’s scholarship is characterized by interdisciplinary, community-engaged, and participatory methods to create novel technologies that meet our needs as a society.

Tony Low has made significant contributions to the fundamental understanding of plasmonic and optoelectronic properties in the exciting class of atomically thin two-dimensional materials. His internationally recognized theoretical research provides original blueprints on the use of these materials to manipulate light, particularly in the mid-infrared spectrum. These materials offer the promise of key breakthrough applications in the mid-infrared spectrum, such as nanophotonics, biosensing, beam forming, and thermal detectors.

Widespread vaccination against human papillomavirus has the potential to prevent several types of cancer, yet many young people are not receiving it. Annie-Laurie McRee’s research centers on addressing this gap. She seeks to advance behavioral, public health, and health services approaches to increasing adolescent vaccination and improving adolescents’ receipt of preventive services, particularly around sexual and reproductive health. Her scholarship is characterized by close collaboration with interdisciplinary colleagues and has helped shape current best practices in the field.

Advances in information technologies, such as mobile, cloud, and AI, hold promise for transforming our society. But their successful implementation depends on our ability to holistically address technical, economic, and social issues. Sen’s interdisciplinary research accounts for these factors in designing IT systems and incentive schemes that help businesses and users make optimal decisions. His pioneering work on “smart data pricing” explores ways to reduce Internet congestion and realize affordable data plans for wider access.

David Vock develops methods for causal inference — a set of statistical tools used to determine the effect of an intervention from observational data – and dynamic treatment regimes, which are used to evaluate and advance personalized treatment strategies. His work has contributed to understanding the survival benefit of lung transplantation and he developed novel statistical methods for evaluating approaches to distributing cadaveric organs to those awaiting transplantation.

Terrion Williamson is an interdisciplinary black feminist scholar. A native of Peoria, Illinois, her first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (2017) uses her hometown as a primary site of interrogation. Currently, she serves as the founding director of the Black Midwest Initiative and is working on both an edited volume about blackness in the Midwest and a book titled We Cannot Live Without Our Lives, a study of black women and serial murder in the U.S.

Early intervention can dramatically improve outcomes for children with autism. However, a significant challenge has been the identification and treatment of such children as early as possible. Wolff’s research addresses this issue through the prospective, longitudinal study of early behavioral and brain development. Currently, he is investigating precursors of maladaptive sensory and repetitive behaviors associated with autism, developing novel approaches to infant intervention, and refining ground-breaking methods to detect autism in infancy.

Dr. Zhang investigates how artificial intelligence can help discover novel pharmacovigilance knowledge from biomedical big data. He has created an innovative translational informatics framework, which enables the generation of hypotheses about clinical issues by mining the biomedical literature and by validating the findings in electronic health record data from large healthcare systems. This signal-generating system accelerates the rate of recognizing new patterns (e.g., drug-supplement interactions, pharmacogenomics-drug relationships) and consequences for health care.