News

Pete Wilkins, a key member of Chicago's innovation community, comments on the ways Chicago's universities are stepping up to address the many issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a part of its response to the economic damage to its surrounding South Side neighborhoods, the University of Chicago announced today that it has made emergency grants to small businesses affected by the pandemic.

Illinois Tech announced today it is re-opening laboratories to assist the state in making the chemical materials critical to the processing of tests for COVID-19. Other universities across the state are also helping with production of various components of the testing kits.

Faculty from the University of Chicago's Ecology and Environment Center are working, along with faculty from other Illinois universities, to help the state understand what it is facing as it begins to think about re-opening the economy in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The University of Illinois at Chicago's medical school announced today that 190 medical students, 3/4 of the class of 2020, have chosen to graduate early so they can take up their residencies in support of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The City Colleges of Chicago, like most other higher education institutions have had to move their courses online to meet the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic. This has affected their students in many ways. But importantly, investments by the system in technology infrastructure to permit distance learning, has made for a smooth transition over the past few weeks.

In response to the job crisis facing many of its students, NEIU developed and posted a site listing a variety of organizations hiring in response to the crisis. Many students need these jobs to be able to continue attending classes and lost them when restaurants and other service companies shut down...

Across higher education in Chicago, student journalists are finding out about the complexities of navigating their work to produce student newspapers, study remotely and just get through the day amidst the coronavirus crisis.

Today the University of Chicago announced a series of initiatives to directly assist the citizens, small businesses and non-profits of its nine neighboring South Side Communities.

Northwestern University announced that a research team headed by Prof. Jiaxing Huang of the McCormick School of Engineering has been awarded a National Science Foundation RAPID grant to further develop a self-sanitizing face mask--a critical need in light of the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic.