In July 2020, Chancellor Jones announced a $2 million annual commitment by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to focus the intellectual and scholarly talent of our university to examine two of the greatest challenges facing our society and seek new solutions. Recognizing the critical need for universities across our nation to prioritize research focused on systemic racial inequities and injustices that exist not only in our communities but in higher education itself, the Chancellor’s Research Program provides support for academic research and the expansion of community-based knowledge that advances the understanding of systemic racism and generationally embedded racial disparity.

Research Focus Areas

For 2025, the research program projects may include but are not limited to:

• Systemic interventions to improve educational outcomes and increase college readiness.
• Research that tackles the complex drivers of health disparities.
• Structural disparities in the criminal justice system.
• Challenges faced by sexual and gender minorities in education, health and the criminal justice system.

This year we are especially interested in supporting entrepreneurial or collaborative projects that could result in near term impact.

Research that tackles with building infrastructure for community-based, non-extractive language work to counteract historical inequities in research. – $35,000

Project Leaders: Korinta Maldonado, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; Juana Juan-Pedro, Pixan Konob’ Maya Q’anjob’al, Language Justice Collective; Akua Forkuo-Sekyere, New American Welcome Center; Nathalie Martinez, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; Brian Acosta, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. 

The proposal seeks to develop the Native American and Indigenous Languages Lab (NAIL) within the American Indian Studies (AIS) Program. Specifically, it seeks to support the lab’s launch by expanding its infrastructure and community-based curriculum and training over one academic year. The lab aims to be a space that centers on Indigenous and community-based methodological frameworks to support and strengthen language reclamation projects and provide support and training across Indigenous language workers and community-engaged scholars (students and faculty).  

As an interdisciplinary, global, ethnic studies program, AIS provides a forum for critical, purposeful inter-/multi- disciplinary collaborative language work projects. Through the development of partnerships across university departments, community organizations, and institutions across the US Midwest, the NAIL lab seeks to become a center for training students on best practices for community-based participatory research engaging with Indigenous languages. The lab will be a space in which “native speakers serve as coequal partners in research,” (Cornelius 2019). Centering in participatory community-based methodologies based on reciprocal, collaborative, and community-guided research practices will serve as a model for preparing future community-based scholars in university and other public-serving institutions. Through community-centered collaborations through curriculum guided credit base upper-level lab course, workshops, and a culminating symposium, the laboratory will be a space that build reciprocal relationships across Indigenous language workers, students, and faculty members.   

College transfer student success – $73,672 

Project Leaders: Aixa Marchand, College of Education, Educational Psychology; Catherine Dornfeld Tissenbaum, College of Education, Curriculum & Instruction

We propose to promote timely transfer and graduation, provide authentic research experiences, and support well-being for underserved transfer students by establishing the Parkland-Illinois Network for Equitable Experiences in Research (PIONEER) program. PIONEER will bring together Parkland College—a two-year associate degree-granting institution in Champaign—and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The PIONEER program will use innovations in online learning and research to bridge undergraduate coursework with lab experience and includes sustained mentoring from faculty and peers to increase research access and a sense of belonging. Infrastructure for transfer students is acutely needed, as many belong to groups historically excluded from research, including students from rural and under-resourced communities, as well as first-generation and low-income students. The PIONEER program will ensure underserved students successfully transition to Illinois and complete baccalaureate degrees on time. PIONEER will begin in the Illinois Department of Psychology (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and will strengthen the Illinois-Parkland relationship while serving as a critical proof-of-concept for the program’s cross-disciplinary team to secure external funding and expand the program. PIONEER will also contribute to establishing a model for further development and dissemination of infrastructure to support transfer student success across Illinois colleges. 

Project Leaders: Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, Associate Professor, College of Agriculture, Consumer & Environmental Sciences/Cancer Center at Illinois; Azlan Guttenberg Smith, College of Agriculture, Consumer & Environmental Sciences/Cancer Center at Illinois; Craig Alonzo Richard, Cancer Center at Illinois. 

Our project addresses cancer disparities through storytelling, research, and community engagement, aligning with the Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program’s 2025 focus areas. Responding to documented cancer outcome disparities among underserved populations in central Illinois and operating within the Societal Impact funding track, we aim to transform cancer research at the University of Illinois by increasing historically excluded groups’ representation and identifying barriers to patient-centered research. Building on 50+ interviews with cancer survivors, families, healthcare providers, and researchers, we will create a verbatim theater script documenting cancer treatment experience and highlighting structural disparities. Through partnerships with U of I Cancer Research Advocacy Group (CRAG), Prairie Dragon Paddlers, and Carle-Mills Breast Cancer Institute, we will reach 500 community members through live performances and other stakeholders through digital distribution. Post-performance discussions and pre/post surveys will measure impact on understanding of cancer disparities. Deliverables include the theater script, 2 live performances reaching local communities across central Illinois, professional-quality recordings and training videos, conference presentations at major medical meetings, and peer-reviewed publications. This approach combines immediate quality-of-life improvements with long-term structural change, providing a replicable model for other institutions. 

Project Leaders: Dan Fogerty, Associate Professor, College of Applied Health Sciences; Sadie Braun, College of Applied Health Sciences; Chelsey Byers, College of Agriculture, Consumer & Environmental Sciences; Matthew Berry, Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation; Lisa Gatzke, Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation.

A major societal burden is the lack of adequate hearing healthcare that limits the life and work participation for 37.5 million adults with hearing loss in the United States. Unfortunately, hearing healthcare is out of reach for many of these adults due to major barriers in accessibility and affordability. Hearing aid use has been reported as low as 8.6% among adults with some hearing handicap. Unmet hearing needs result in a broad range of medical, social, and economic consequences. There is an urgent need for improved hearing screening and assessment to tackle this disparity in health care access. Furthermore, the care that may be available lacks direct ecological relevance to the primary hearing complaint: difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments. This mismatch between standard clinical practice and patient goals interferes with hearing healthcare uptake and increases costs associated with pursuing clinical interventions misaligned with patient goals. In a progressive series of broader impacts, examining implementation in the laboratory, in the audiology clinic, and in communities across the state, this project will develop and implement an at-home assessment to support hearing healthcare. This project addresses a highly significant societal need with a plan for long-term sustainability of national impact.

Project Leaders: Yael Gertner, Teaching Assistant Professor Computer Science, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science; Daphane Hammer, Central High School; Chrystalla Mouza, College of Education. 

This project aims to expand a summer mentorship program for high school students in Champaign County that we have designed and implemented since 2022. Our program’s goal is to broaden participation in computing in our community through a paired mentorship program designed to promote interest and a sense of belonging in the field of computer science (CS) by partnering students with a faculty research mentor. The success of our program so far built on our relationship between the Illinois team and a teacher at Central High School who has identified and motivated students, especially girls, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latine, and/or Native American/Indigenous to apply. This project’s goal is to expand our program in two ways. First, we plan to build collaborative partnerships with more teachers, by designing and piloting a professional development (PD) program (for up to 15 teachers) focusing on integrating computing projects inspired by research into their existing curriculum. Second, based on feedback from past participants, we plan to develop a set of activities that further enrich student experience in our program including organization, presentation, and communication skills. The meetings will also serve as social and networking opportunities to allow students to build community within the program and CS.

Project Leaders: Jadyn Harris, Postdoctoral Research Associate, College of Education. 

How do preschoolers experience and think about school…in their own words? How might BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) children experience school when teachers actively work to build culturally sustainable partnerships with families? What might the long-term effects be? This Societal Impact project is an extension of a current, larger project (“Math Partners”) in which Champaign-Urbana preschool teachers and families partner to design early math activities that prioritize the ways that children and their families “do” math in their daily life. Funded by NSF, Math Partners coaches teachers on building strong relationships with families. When examining whether classroom “interventions” are effective, researchers rarely elicit children’s own perspectives. The focus of this project adds to the larger, funded project to fill this need: we will develop innovative “interview” approaches – e.g. through art, play, and so on – so that small children’s voices might be brought to the forefront, just as they begin their school experience. The “Who tells it best?” project will use the protocols and children’s stories gathered during this one year grant to build protocols and cultivate relationships with C-U children and families in preparation for longitudinal research exploring the long-term effects of early home/school partnerships for BIPOC children.

Project Leaders:Jennifer Robbennolt, Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law, College of Law; Jay Jennings, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; Ajay Singh, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

According to SPOTLITE data, there are more than 2,000 encounters every year where law enforcement uses lethal force against a civilian. Although concern about this has generated a host of research efforts that explore the antecedents of the use of lethal force, the role of interventions, and how the use of force is evaluated, neither social scientists nor legal scholars have focused on how law enforcement agencies and officials respond publicly when death or injury is caused by law enforcement use of lethal force. This project seeks to answer key questions about how governmental institutions respond when they have caused harm by systematically examining the public responses made by law enforcement and government officials to incidents involving the use of lethal force. We will collect and code the public statements made by officials in response to law enforcement use of force incidents in Illinois from 2019 through 2024 to provide an overall picture of these responses and to explore how characteristics of the incident, the civilian, and the law enforcement agency influence the responses provided.