U of I News Bureau – In two new studies, University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Naiman Khan; postdoctoral researcher Anne Walk, who is affiliated with the Beckman Institute’s Intelligent Systems research theme; and their colleagues found links between levels of lutein in the eye and cognition and academic performance in pre-adolescent children.

NPRE at Illinois – Yang Zhang, an assistant professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering and a member of Beckman’s Autonomous Materials Systems Group, has won the 2017 Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award from the American Nuclear Society.

U of I News Bureau – When the University of Illinois was established, its physical presence consisted of 10 acres for its main campus and a ramshackle five-story building, nicknamed The Elephant, located where the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology now sits on the north end of campus. As the U. of I. celebrates its 150th birthday, the campus now consists of 4,550 acres (excluding the farms) and 647 buildings. A recently released book— “An Illini Place: Building the University of Illinois Campus,” published by the University of Illinois Press—traces the history of the physical place, including the many plans for the look and expansion of the campus, the architectural style of its buildings and where they would be located.

ECE Illinois – Last month, Lav R. Varshney, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and member of Beckman’s Organizational Intelligence and Computational Social Science Group, participated in “Computational Creativity: AI and the art of ingenuity,” part of the 2017 World Science Festival at New York University. The panel discussed artificial intelligence and the development of creativity in computers.