Research and Honors is a monthly column of the Illinois State Report newsletter, celebrating recent Honors, Publications, and Presentations of faculty and staff.

Presentations

Keith Pluymers, HIS, presented a paper titled “Dragons and Mud: Steam Engines and London’s Eighteenth-Century Water Supply” at the Western Conference on British Studies annual meeting at Washington University.

Amy Wood, HIS, gave an invited talk online titled “Retribution or Rehabilitation? The New York Prison System in Historical Perspective” to students and faculty at Hostos Community College in Bronx, NY, as part of their Common Core Curriculum.

Heba Elgazzar, TEC, won the distinction of best presentation for “Utilization of Large Language Model-based Embeddings for Recommendation Systems” in the Application of Machine Learning session at IEEE UEMCON 2025.

Lindsay Stallones Marshall, HIS, participated in a panel discussion, “Throughlines: Teaching History in Hard Times Across the Secondary-Higher Education Divide,” and presented her research, “Ornery Broncs Don’t Exist: Applying a Horse-Centered Lens to Archival Animals,” in a roundtable on animals in the archives at the Western Historical Association Annual Conference in Albuquerque, NM.

Publications

Michael D. Sublett, GEO, published an academic memoir, “No More Slide Rules” in Illinois Geographer.

Liangcheng Yang, HSC, and Robert Rhykerd and David Kopsell, both from AGR, co-authored “Recycling energy and nutrients from anaerobic co-digestion of swine manure with crop residues in soybean-winter cover crop-corn rotation” in Bioresource Technology.

Ben M. Sadd, BSC, co-authored “Pesticide and pathogen exposure causes idiosyncratic gene expression responses across four diverse North American bumble bee species” in Molecular Ecology.

Chang Su-Russell and Amy Bardwell, FCS, co-authored “An Examination of Well-Being and Retention during the Transition of Learning Modality in a University Academic Department” in Teaching and Learning Inquiry.

Michelle Kibler, AGR, co-authored “Risks and uncertainty associated with prices set by equine boarding facility owners” in Translational Animal Science.

Jin Park, KNR, co-authored “Private coaching in competitive youth football: labor, inequities, and the commodification of skill development” in Sport in Society.

Liz Sattler, Eric Kramer, and Micaela Bradley, all KNR, co-authored “We’re Hiring! Preparing Students for Sport Industry Employment Through an Exploration of Current Hiring Practices” in Sport Management Education Journal.

Kaitlyn Selman, CJS, published “Carceral consequences and perverse perks: care and the disciplinary alternative school” in Contemporary Justice Review.

Kelly Reddy-Best, FCS, co-authored “Gay Rodeos, Western Wear, and Unresolved Tensions in 21st-Century North America Cowboy Culture and Esthetics” in Fashion Theory.

Meenal Chaudhari, IT, published “A Survey of Pretrained Protein Language Models; Large Language Models (LLMs) in Protein Bioinformatics” in Methods in Molecular Biology, vol. 2941.

Charles Bell, CJS, co-authored “The Cost of Challenging School Seclusion and Restraint Practices for Parents of Black and White Children with Disabilities” in Disability Studies Quarterly.

Andrew Eberline, and Emily Jones, both KNR, co-authored “School Administrators’ Efforts to Maintain and Improve School Wellness Environments: A School University Partnership Monitoring Factors Affecting School Wellness” in Journal of the National Extension Association of Family & Consumer Sciences.

Scott K. Sakaluk and Charles F. Thompson, both BSC, co-authored “Mitonuclear incompatibility as an alternative hypothesis for male-biased offspring sex ratios arising from extra-pair matings” in Journal of Ornithology.

Thomas Burr, SOC, published a book titled Societies Past and Present: A Social Science World History.

Janice Jayes, HIS, published an article, “The Deportation Industry and the Shadows of Indian Removal” in Public i.

Keith Pluymers, HIS, published the following:

• “Regulating the City: Streetscaping, Sewers, and the Project of Universal Drainage in Philadelphia” in the Journal for the History of Knowledge.
• “Climate Anxiety, Climate Ambition, and Early American Infrastructure” in History Now, the online journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

Andres Vidal-Gadea and Kyle Floyd, both BSC, co-authored “Independent validation of transgenerational inheritance of learned pathogen avoidance in Caenorhabditis elegans” in eLife.

For questions, please contact Valerie Welsh in Media Relations, vawelsh@ilstu.edu, or Report@ilstu.edu.