In our research enterprise, we are embracing a concept best described as “radical collaborations” which will drive critical aspects of our nation’s infrastructure for innovation and prosperity.
What is a radical collaboration?
- Looking beyond traditional sponsored research
- Partnering with other institutions of higher education, state and federal government, the world’s top companies and private organizations with a focus on community impact.
- Imagining an even bigger role for the 21st century land-grant university
- Innovating to benefit all humanity
Radical collaborations are vehicles that enable transformational innovation.
Pioneering Partnerships
The large and complex problems we face cannot be solved by any one institution. Collaboration is key to our success.
Here are a few examples in which Illinois has a leading or significant role:
Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park
This is a $500 million project led by Illinois in partnership with the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Defense. It is a first-of-its-kind research park for scaling up quantum computing and advanced microelectronics exploration, building on the strong relationships in the Chicago Quantum Exchange — a longstanding partnership between Illinois and the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This project advances science and engineering in quantum computing while training the burgeoning industry’s workforce and driving its economy.
iFAB Tech Hub
The Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Hub is a $51 million project uniting more than 30 organizations in higher education, government, labor and venture groups. This initiative will unite cutting-edge research, scalable infrastructure and abundant feedstock production within a 51-mile radius of the Illinois campus, positioning central Illinois as a global leader for biomanufacturing.
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago
Sixteen Illinois researchers have been selected to become part of the inaugural cohort of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago Investigators. The 48-member group, which will focus on instrumented tissues, inflammation and the functions of the immune system, also includes investigators from Northwestern University and University of Chicago.
Empower Parenting with Resources project
This projectexplores the efficacy of temporary economic support at preventing recurrent child maltreatment in Illinois families. Led by Illinois social work professor Will Schneider, it is supported by the William T. Grant Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation.
CABBI
The Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Bioenergy Research Center, is a collaboration between Illinois and 20 partner institutions. It has received more than $260 million since 2017. The CABBI Greenhouse was dedicated in November 2024 and will promote CABBI’s vision to integrate recent advances in agronomics, genomics and synthetic and computational biology to increase the value and sustainability of energy crops.
Humanities Without Walls
Established in 2014 with support from the Mellon Foundation, Humanities Without Walls is a large-scale project involving 16 partner institutions, based at the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois. With more than $12 million in funding during the last decade, this initiative has supported intensive career exploration workshops for humanities graduate students and multi-institutional research collaborations with an orientation toward reciprocal community-based research and practice.
DeltaAI
This year, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications launched DeltaAI. Funded by the National Science Foundation, DeltaAI is an advanced resource that will be available to the nation’s research community and a companion system to NCSA’s Delta. Built and operated at the former home of the Blue Waters supercomputer, DeltaAI will accelerate complex artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data by using state-of-the-art hardware.
Speech Accessibility Project
Today’s speech recognition systems, such as voice assistants and translation tools, do not always recognize people with a diversity of speech patterns often associated with disabilities. The Speech Accessibility Project collects speech samples from paid volunteers representing a diversity of speech patterns to create a dataset for training machine learning models. It has unprecedented cross-industry support from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as nonprofit organizations whose communities will benefit.