CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Five professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named 2026-2027 University Scholars in recognition of their achievements in teaching, scholarship and service.
The program honors faculty excellence and provides $15,000 to each scholar for three years to enhance their academic careers. That money may be used for travel, equipment, research assistants, books or other purposes.
“The University Scholars program recognizes faculty whose work exemplifies the very best of the University of Illinois System,” said Nicholas Jones, the executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs for the University of Illinois System. “Through their groundbreaking research, innovative teaching and service to their disciplines and communities, these scholars advance knowledge, enrich the student experience and help address society’s most pressing challenges.”
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The five Urbana campus recipients, as described by their nominators:
Sara Gerke
Sara Gerke, the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar at the College of Law, is an expert in health law and bioethics with a particular focus on artificial intelligence and digital health. She also holds an affiliation as a professor in the European Union Center at Illinois.
Gerke’s research examines the ethical and legal challenges of AI and big data in healthcare as well as health law in the U.S. and Europe. She has led or contributed to numerous interdisciplinary projects that draw on her expertise in these fields, especially in emerging medical technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, bionics and stem cell research. Currently, Gerke is leading two major Illinois studies funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe funding program: the legal and ethical implications of AI-assisted surgeries and the concerns raised by the use of AI in colonoscopies. With the explosion of interest in subject matters related to her research, Gerke’s work and perspective are in demand. She has more than 100 publications in her portfolio, is a frequent guest lecturer at institutions across the world and served as an external reviewer for the World Health Organization’s guidance on the “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health.”
Jingrui He
Information sciences professor Jingrui He is an award-winning scholar of heterogeneous machine learning and the real-world applications of heterogeneous data. She has affiliations with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Illinois Informatics, the Center for Digital Agriculture and NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology.
He’s research centers on the designing, building and testing of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize and predict real-world data by means of traditional and modern AI such as agentic systems. She then seeks to embed those methods within applicable industries — sustainability and agriculture, healthcare, national security and finance — to foster positive societal impact. Her research record has made her a routine recipient of recognition, including the 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2025 Amazon Research Award, a three-time recipient of the IBM Faculty Award, multiple best/distinguished paper awards and recently an induction to Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society. She also has served as a leader and mentor to students since joining the university in 2019, serving as a program committee co-chair for leading conferences, such as ACM SIGKDD, IEEE BigData and PAKDD, ranking as an excellent teacher — as determined by her students — and developing the next generation of information professionals as the director of the master of science in information management program.
Marc Hertzman
History professor Marc Hertzman specializes in the history of Brazil and Latin America with special interests in race, the African diaspora, culture, slavery and its legacies, labor and gender. Hertzman has additional affiliations at Illinois with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies, the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and as the director of graduate studies for the history department.
While his previous work focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, Hertzman’s current scholarship explores deeper into the past: the colonial era of Brazil. Specifically, he has examined the afterlives and cultural, spiritual, physical and monetary inheritances of Palmares, one of history’s largest and longest-standing fugitive slave settlements, and its iconic leader, Zumbi. His 2024 book, “After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi,” won the American Historical Association’s 2025 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History and the Brazilian Studies Association’s 2026 Roberto Reis Book Award. Hertzman values the impact of public engagement and has shared his expertise in written pieces for New York Magazine and Time as well as appearances on Al-Jazeera to provide news analysis on Brazil.
Vesna Stojanoska
Vesna Stojanoska is a professor of mathematics and a Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar. Her research interests include chromatic phenomena in stable homotopy theory, a branch of mathematics studying properties of shapes that remain invariant under continuous deformations. Those properties are encoded by generalized cohomology theories; the chromatic approach is a way to systematically sort cohomology theories by a quality reminiscent of wavelength. Stojanoska’s work focuses on questions of duality and invertibility for chromatically interesting cohomology theories, reflecting a specific type of self-symmetry or reversibility and often creating fascinating connections with geometry and arithmetic.
Stojanoska has garnered several accolades for her work as a mathematician. She received the Simons Fellowship in Mathematics in 2022 and was named to the 2026 Class of Fellows for the American Mathematical Society. She also has shepherded the educational and career prospects of numerous undergraduate and graduate students by supplying thoughtful, caring mentorship.
Wendy Yang
Wendy Yang, a professor of plant biology, oversees research in terrestrial biogeochemistry and ecosystem ecology with a focus on the mechanisms driving patterns in soil emissions of greenhouse gases and rates of nutrient transformations in the environment. Yang broadly seeks to improve understanding of plant-soil-microbe interactions to better predict, adapt to and mitigate the effects of global environmental changes. An important component of her research has been the development of novel methodologies — using tracer and natural abundance stable isotope techniques — to measure production and consumption of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, in soil. Her scholarly output includes numerous projects, such as studying the effects of rainfall intensification on soil greenhouse gas emissions in the Midwest and the ecological sustainability implications of bioenergy cropping systems.
Yang has maintained a busy profile in her 13 years at Illinois. In addition to her lab pursuits, she serves as the deputy director of research and development of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation and as the associate director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center. She earned the LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2021 and the Campus Award for Excellence in Guiding Undergraduate Research in 2025. She is affiliated with the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Center for Digital Agriculture.
