Sayan Mitra, Ph.D.
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mitra, Ph.D., is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, where he is also a John Bardeen Faculty Scholar and the Director of the Center for Autonomy.
He received his B.E.E. from Jadavpur University, his M.S. in Computer Science and Automation from the Indian Institute of Science, and his Ph.D. from MIT.
Mitra’s research spans formal verification, autonomy, aerial robotics, and cyber-physical systems. His group has developed foundational algorithms in this space, including early data-driven verification methods for multi-agent cyber-physical systems and, more recently, certified perception algorithms for photorealistic Gaussian splatting scene representations.
He is the author of Verifying Cyber-Physical Systems (MIT Press, 2021) and the co-founder of Rational CyPhy, an Illinois-based startup developing certified software for beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone operations.
He serves on the steering committee of the ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC) and as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems.
Mitra’s work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award and an AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award, and student work from the group has earned the ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award and an ACM Student Research Competition Award.
His former students hold faculty positions at MIT, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and research and engineering roles at Waymo, Zoox, and Meta.
The group has received several best paper awards, and his work has been covered in Quanta Magazine and on Illinois Public Media.
Christopher M. Napolitano, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Napolitano, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at Illinois. He also holds affiliate appointments in the Department of Psychology’s division and at the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences.
As a life-span developmental psychologist, his research explores the conceptualization, measurement, and development of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills, as well as self-regulatory actions, with a particular focus on adolescence and young adulthood.
Napolitano, along with his colleagues Emily Stone, Olivia Hagedorn, Kaylin Ratner, and College of Education Dean Chrystalla Mouza, is the principal investigator for “The Alma Project.”
This project merges Illinois’ emphasis on civic engagement with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues’ frameworks to research and cultivate the virtue of neighborliness, defined as “compassion, care, and respect for all those in one’s community.”
This effort aligns deeply with Illinois’ land-grant mission to serve the public good and leverages the We CU Community Engaged Learning program.
Napolitano and his colleagues were recently funded by the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University to develop capacity for the Alma Project, with the overall aims of cultivating civic character and purpose through community-engaged learning.
His high-impact research portfolio includes more than 70 works, over 3,000 citations, and an h-index of 27.
A cornerstone of his scientific work is the development of the BESSI, a comprehensive taxonomy and assessment framework for SEB skills, developed with colleagues Brent Roberts and Christopher Soto. The BESSI framework is now utilized widely, with validation studies spanning global contexts including China, Brazil, Italy, and Spain.
Beyond its research application, the BESSI is freely available for researchers and practitioners to use, lowering the cost of entry for those interested in measuring and promoting SEB skills.
Furthermore, Napolitano has pioneered research into the complexities of goal pursuit, including the “backup plan paradox,” wherein the investing in having a backup plan can inadvertently bring about the conditions it was developed to address. He has also investigated the role of serendipity in human development, as well as novel conceptualizations of self-control.
Napolitano earned his B.A. summa cum laude in Human Development and History from Boston College in 2008. He then completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in Child Development at Tufts University.
Xing Wang, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Wang, Ph.D., is a bioengineer and biochemist at Illinois. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from New York University.
He did his postdoctoral training at Princeton University to mainly explore novel functions of synthetic RNAs in genome editing.
Wang’s research group utilizes nucleic acids and protein engineering and chemistry to evolve new molecular binders and create and customize designer DNA nanostructure-based “plug-and-play” platforms for bioengineering, bio nanotechnology, and biochemical applications centered on healthcare.
His group has also established an integrated pipeline that combines machine learning, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics simulations to rapidly obtain new aptamer ligands for emerging or important biomarkers.
Wang’s group has invented the DNA Star, DNA Net, and DNA NanoGripper technologies and molecular platforms. His group has pioneered the concept of pattern-recognition enabled multivalent molecular interactions, highlighted by publications in leading scientific journals, for advanced disease diagnostics and therapeutics.
Wang received the Mikashi Award in 2021, was selected as a Fellow of Y Combinator (YC) Founder Cohort that same year, earned the Spoke Award (CZ Biohub) in 2024, and selected as a member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Senior Members in 2026. He is also the co-founder of a startup company, Atom Bioworks Inc., where he currently serves as a scientific advisor.
Emily E. LB. Twarog, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Twarog, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at Illinois and Co-Director of the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Programs.
She earned her Ph.D. in American History at the University of Illinois Chicago and a master’s in labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Labor Center.
Her book Politics in the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in 20th Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the ways in which housewives in America used food protests as political tools to gain political influence both locally and nationally.
She is also the author of several articles and book chapters related to the evolution of working-class women’s leadership development as well as gender violence in the workplace.
Currently, she is writing a book on the history of sexual harassment resistance in the service sector called, “Hands Off: A History of Fighting Back against Sexual Harassment in the American Workplace.”
In addition to an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship (2019), Twarog’s work has been funded by numerous grants from the Hagley Museum and Library; the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; University of Illinois’ Campus Research Board, BRIGDE, Humanities Research Institute, and the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies among others.
She was recently elected Secretary of the Labor and Working-Class History and serves on the board of the Mother Jones Heritage Project. She is also an Associate Editor at Labor: Studies in Working Class History and a frequent contributor to major media outlets, including The Atlantic, USA Today, The Washington Post, AP News, and NPR programming as well as podcasts.
Twarog grew up in New England and after moving around the country she settled in the Chicago area in 1999.
She spent 15 years in the food service industry as a line cook, drive-thru cashier, assistant pastry chef, bread baker, scone entrepreneur, and server. She was the president of GEO/UAW Local 2322 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a community organizer with the Campaign for Labor Rights and Jobs with Justice, and a member of UNITE HERE Local 1 and a union steward in a downtown Chicago hotel where she worked as a server.
She currently lives in Skokie where she served eight years on the local school board with her husband, two kids who grew up on the picket line, and their dog Rocket. She enjoys reading historical fiction, cooking, gardening, traveling, knitting, and walking her dog.
Philip S. L. Anderson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Anderson, Ph. D., is an evolutionary biomechanist. He is an Associate Professor of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior in the School of Integrative Biology at Illinois.
Anderson received his B. A. in Geology from Carleton College in 2001 and his Ph. D. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2007.
He had a series of post-doctoral positions at the University of Bristol in the UK, University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Duke University before landing at Illinois in 2016.
His research career began utilizing physics and mechanics to make inferences about how extinct organisms lived, focusing in particular on feeding mechanics and teeth in vertebrates. As a post-doc, he began exploring how biomechanical systems in general evolved, specifically the diversification and evolution of multi-part systems.
Currently, the Anderson lab focuses on how the laws of physics influence evolution and diversification across a wide range of organisms (vertebrates, invertebrates and plants) with a specific focus on puncture tools (fangs, claws, stingers and spines).
This new project brings his research full circle as he and his colleague at Birmingham explore the mechanics of beaks in non-avian fossil tetrapods.
Becca Taylor, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Taylor, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics at Illinois. She is a leading expert on the economics of regulating waste from consumer items, particularly the regulation of single-use plastic packaging.
Taylor analyzes the effectiveness of environmental and food policies in changing consumer behavior, especially when there is debate over optimal policy design.
She also studies how these policies interact with issues of equity and how these policies displace consumption in unintended ways, such as consumers buying more garbage bags when plastic carryout bags are banned.
Her research has gained international attention and has been covered by news outlets in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, and Indonesia. Her papers have also influenced policy recommendations, such as those given by the UN’s Environmental Programme “Legislative Guide for the Regulation of Single-Use Plastic Products,” and have won distinguished awards (Best Paper Prize 2020 in the Journal of Environmental Economics & Management).
Taylor received her Ph.D. in Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in Economics at Washington and Lee University.
Emanuel Rota, Ph.D.
Director of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Rota, Ph.D., is a historian of modern Europe whose research focuses on intellectual history, the history of political ideologies, and the relationship between governance, political trust, and public opinion.
His work examines how ideas about Europe, democracy, and collective futures circulate across national contexts and institutional scales.
Rota serves as director of the European Union Center at Illinois, which is a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center. In this role, he leads interdisciplinary research initiatives, fosters international partnerships, and develops public engagement programs focused on European politics, society, and transatlantic relations.
He is also an associate professor of history at Illinois, where he has taught since 2006. During the 2024-25 academic year, he was a visiting professor at the Università di Bologna’s MemoryLab. Earlier in his career, he was a lecturer in Jewish studies and Italian at Dartmouth College from 2003 to 2005.
Rota earned a doctoral degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005 after completing graduate studies there from 1999 to 2005. He received a master’s degree in history from the University of Oregon in 1999 and earned his bachelor’s degree from the Università di Pavia in 1995.
His publications include Fascist Europeanism: Its Francophone-Italian Roots from Pan-Europa to the European Communities (Routledge, 2025) and A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration (Fordham University Press, 2012; paperback edition, 2015). His scholarly articles examine topics ranging from Enlightenment concepts of immunity to race, migration, citizenship and labor in modern Europe, including work published in Configurations, Cultural Critique, Italian Culture and Contemporary Italian Politics.
In addition to his research and teaching, Rota has led major international research initiatives. He served as principal investigator for a Horizon Europe project on political trust, public opinion and climate governance in Europe from 2019 to 2023 and currently serves as principal investigator of a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.
He is also co-principal investigator on a Horizon Europe project focused on transatlantic policies beginning in 2026. In these capacities, he advances collaborative research on Europe and transatlantic affairs, while contributing to review panels and advisory boards in his field.
Daniel J. Bodony, Ph.D.
Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Bodony, Ph.D., is the Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar, Blue Waters Professor of Aerospace Engineering, and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in The Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois.
He also holds courtesy appointments with the Materials Research Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. In addition, he serves as co-director of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies.
Bodony’s research focuses on the simulation and modeling of high-speed, high-enthalpy compressible flows.
His areas of expertise include fluid-thermal-structural interactions, the control of shock-laden flows and aeroacoustics.
Through his work, he advances the understanding of complex aerospace systems and contributes to the development of technologies for hypersonic flight and other challenging high-speed flow applications.
Catherine Christian-Hinman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in Molecular and Integrative Physiology (MIP) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Christian-Hinman, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Molecular and Integrative Physiology (MIP) at Illinois, where she is a member of the Neuroscience Program and an affiliate of the Beckman Institute and Institute for Genomic Biology. She is currently the MIP Director of Graduate Studies.
Christian-Hinman graduated with an A.B. in Neuroscience and Italian Language and Literature from Smith College in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia in 2008.
After completing postdoctoral training in Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, she joined the MIP department as a faculty member in 2014 and was awarded tenure in 2021.
Christian-Hinman studies hormonal changes and sex differences in epilepsy, which affects 65 million people worldwide and is the 4th-most common neurological disease. She has been awarded multiple NIH grants and private foundation awards from CURE Epilepsy, the American Epilepsy Society, Hope for Hypothalamic Hamartomas, the Whitehall Foundation, the Brain Research Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation to support her research.
She is also active in service to the field of epilepsy research, including service on multiple committees of the American Epilepsy Society, as a standing NIH study section member, and as a member of the Task Force on Reproduction and Hormones of the Epilepsy Research Institute UK.
Her laboratory’s research integrates neuroscience, physiology, and endocrinology, with an emphasis on interactions between the brain and endocrine systems in the context of seizures and epilepsy.
People with epilepsy are at higher risk for reproductive endocrine disorders, which significantly affect quality of life, influence the efficacy of antiseizure medications, and result in elevated risks for other conditions. Christian-Hinman’s lab has made novel contributions to understanding how functional changes in the brain and pituitary gland link epilepsy and seizure activity to reproductive endocrine dysfunction, how these effects are different in males and females, and how some changes are specific to certain phases of the estrous cycle – the rodent female ovarian cycle that is akin to the human menstrual cycle.
In addition to examining endocrine conditions that co-occur with epilepsy, Christian-Hinman’s research examines sex differences and hormonal influences on seizure activity itself.
For example, her lab has found that female mice show more severe epilepsy in a commonly used mouse model of temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common type of epilepsy in adults. In addition, many females in this model show fluctuations in seizure activity associated with estrous cycle stage, similar to at least some aspects of seizure clustering as observed in catamenial epilepsy, which is characterized by seizure exacerbation at certain phases of the menstrual cycle.
The biological reasons for these sex differences and cycle stage-associated changes are unknown. One possibility is that metabolic changes in regions of the brain that generate the seizures are different in males and females.
Christian-Hinman will collaborate with Felix Chan, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in Pharmacy at the University of Birmingham who is an expert in metabolic changes in the brain that both arise as a consequence of seizures and promote seizure activity.
He will help the Christian-Hinman laboratory to identify sex distinct metabolic signatures of epilepsy. Reciprocally, Christian-Hinman will assist Chan’s lab in developing experimental designs to evaluate the effects of sex and hormones on metabolic regulation in seizures and animal models of rare genetic epilepsy syndromes.
The BRIDGE Initiation Grant will also support site visits by Christian-Hinman and Chan to train students and deliver research seminars and workshops at Illinois and Birmingham, and planning and development of experiments for inclusion in future funding proposals.
Shelby Keye, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Keye, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at Illinois and Director of the Physical Literacy, Activity, and Youthful Function Laboratory (PLAY Lab).
She earned her Ph.D. in Kinesiology and Community Health from Illinois, her M.S. in Exercise Science from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and her B.S. in Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise from Virginia Tech.
Keye’s research focuses on the connections between physical activity, fitness, weight status, motor skills, brain function, and cognitive health across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on children and youth.
Her lab examines how health behaviors support cognitive, motor, academic, and developmental outcomes. This work is grounded in the idea that movement, weight status, and brain health are interconnected, and that modifiable health behaviors can be leveraged to support healthy development.
The PLAY Lab uses interdisciplinary methods to study these questions, including physical activity and fitness assessments, motor skill and balance testing, health behavior and weight status measures, cognitive tasks, classroom observations, and neurophysiological tools such as EEG/ERP and fNIRS.
Keye is also interested in global health disparities and collaborates with teams in Brazil and Birmingham to better understand how social and structural factors shape physical activity, obesity, and health across the lifespan.
Overall, Keye’s work aims to generate practical, developmentally appropriate, and equity-focused evidence that can inform programs, policies, and environments that help children and families move more, support healthy development, and thrive.
Kahyun Choi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Choi, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at Illinois, where she joined the faculty in 2024.
Before coming to Illinois, she served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University at Bloomington from 2019 to 2024. She received her Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the Illinois, where her doctoral research laid the foundation for her ongoing work at the intersection of computation, culture, and information.
Choi’s research applies computational methods and machine learning to cultural data across multiple modalities, with a particular focus on audio and text. Her work spans two core fields, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Digital Humanities (DH), within the broader discipline of Information Science, and her collaborative publications also appear in Library Science, Education, and Human-Computer Interaction venues.
One of her central research lines is the computational analysis of poetry, music, and musicality in speech. In this line of work, she utilized signal processing algorithms and machine learning models to examine how poetic language sounds, how song lyrics convey themes, and how human interpretations of text enrich our understanding of cultural collections.
Her dissertation titled, “Computational Lyricology: Quantitative Approaches to Understanding Song Lyrics and Their Interpretations,” introduced a community-driven data enrichment framework that integrates user-generated interpretations into supervised machine learning for song lyric analysis, an approach that continues to inform her current work in poetry and lyrics.
A second major line of her research focuses on ethical AI workflows for digital libraries. Choi is the Principal Investigator of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Early Career Research Development grant titled “Unbiased AI for Poetry Analysis: Toward Equitable and Diverse Digital Libraries.” This project develops an open-source AI framework to help libraries explore, curate, and analyze large collections of digitized poetry while centering equity and diversity.
Her related work on human–AI co-creation of cultural datasets and metadata examines how human judgment and AI models can be meaningfully integrated in the construction and enrichment of library collections.
Choi also leads research on AI literacy education in public library contexts. As co-Principal Investigator of an IMLS National Leadership Grant (2021–2024), she collaborated on the “AI & Co-design in Public Libraries” project, which empowered underserved youth to critically engage with AI through community-centered design.
She has led hands-on AI literacy workshops for teenagers at public libraries in Maryland and San Diego and co-presented a YALSA webinar on AI literacy programs for youth librarians in 2023.
As an educator, Choi has developed and taught graduate-level courses on music data mining and database design and has contributed to undergraduate and professional education in digital libraries.
She has been recognized as Outstanding on the University of Illinois List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (2025) and received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award (2023) for her contributions to the educational mission at IU.
Beyond the two IMLS grants mentioned above, Choi has been recognized with additional honors, including the 2021 Luddy Faculty Fellowship for her project “AI for Literature.”
She is an active contributor to her research communities, serving as a meta-reviewer for the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) and a board member of the Korean Society for Music Informatics.
She has also served as a panel reviewer for IMLS grants and as a reviewer for leading venues including the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), ASIS&T, and the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL).
Kristin Hoganson, Ph.D.
Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Hoganson, Ph.D., is the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History at Illinois. She has written extensively on U.S. imperialism around the turn of the twentieth century, starting with Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale University Press, 1998); Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2016).
Her 2019 book, The Heartland: An American History (Penguin Press), selected by NPR as a Best Book of the Year, uses local history methods to reframe understandings of colonialism, borderlands, isolationism, alliance politics, trans imperialism, global imaginaries, national security, and place.
She has also co-edited two volumes with Jay Sexton, Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Duke University Press, 2020) and The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 2 (1812-1900) (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Her current research, supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, is on the expansion of U.S. power via infrastructure building at the dawn of the big carbon era.
