Michel Bellini
Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, The School of Molecular and Cellular Biology & Director, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

Dr. Bellini is interested in the organization of the nucleus; chromosomes and other nuclear organelles; RNA transcription and processing; ribonucleoproteins, nucleo-cytoplasmic trafficking.

Jodi Byrd
Associate Professor, English & Gender and Women’s Studies

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is also an faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her work has been published in journals including American Indian Quarterly, Cultural Studies Review, Interventions, College Literature, J19, and American Quarterly. Her book, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota, 2011) won the 2013 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Award for best first book. Her next project Indigenomicon: American Indians, Videogames, and the Structures of Genre delves into the literary and digital realms of play to think further about how the colonization of American Indians continues to inform imaginary terrains.

William Patterson
Lecturer, College of Engineering & Technology Entrepreneurship

Dr. Patterson is a lecturer in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Patterson focuses on preparing students of various Hip Hop generations to be civic-minded urban global leaders in cultural innovation, entrepreneurship, engineering, business, art, and technology. He challenges students by contextualizing applied learning methods that encourage students to re-think various forms of traditional scholarship from a variety of disciplines in order to address contemporary issues that impact urban environments around the globe. More…

John Towns
Deputy CIO of Research IT, Technology Services at Illinois

John Towns is Deputy CIO for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Executive Director for Science & Technology at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, also at Illinois).  He is also PI and Project Director for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project and Director of the Illinois Campus Cluster Program. Towns plays significant roles in the deployment and operation of high-end resources and services, and distributed computing projects providing leadership and direction in the development and provisioning of advanced computing resources and services. His background is in computational astrophysics utilizing a variety of computational architectures with a focus on application performance analysis. He earned M.S. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Illinois and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Missouri-Rolla. More…

José J. Vázquez
Clinical Professor, Economics

José J. Vázquez, Ph.D. is a Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches one of the largest Economics courses in the country (925 students). He is also the Coordinator of e-Learning, as well as the Director of the Teaching Academy for the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. During his tenure at Illinois he has received several teaching awards, including Outstanding Teacher of Freshmen Award. Dr. Vazquez specializes in developing technologies for large enrollment courses, particularly classroom simulation games and web-based assessments/activities. He has published his work in several academic journals and has presented at numerous academic conferences. He is also the co-creator of FlipIt Economics, along with Eric Chiang of Florida Atlantic University. FlipIt Econ, published by Macmillan, is a multimedia solution that helps students prepare effectively for class.

Joe Yun
Ph.D. student, Informatics & Leader, Social Media Analytics

Joseph Yun is the leader of social media analytics for Technology Services at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He is also a PhD student in Informatics at the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois, and conducts research in the realm of computational advertising.