CDA and AIFARMS Affiliates Jingrui He and Wendy Yang are among the five professors named 2026-2027 University Scholars, recognized for their achievements in teaching, scholarship, and service.
The University Scholars Program recognizes outstanding faculty members and provides each recipient $15,000 annually for three years, supporting their scholarly pursuits such as travel, research, and materials. University Scholars awards are based on a rigorous nomination process that recognizes a recipient’s excellence and the University’s commitment to fostering excellence, people, and their work.
“We are tremendously proud to see Jingrui He and Wendy Yang recognized as University Scholars and equally proud to have them as part of the Center for Digital Agriculture community. Their accomplishments reflect the exceptional scholarship found across Illinois and the value of bringing different disciplines together around important challenges. Wendy’s connections across CDA, IGB, ISEE, and the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center are a particularly good example of how faculty can bridge organizations and disciplines. These relationships strengthen all of our institutes and centers and create opportunities to work together on challenges in agriculture, sustainability, biology, and AI that no single discipline or organization can address alone. We congratulate Jingrui and Wendy on this very well-deserved recognition,” said John Reid, CDA executive director and U. of I. research professor.
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, AIFARMS Institute, and NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology.
Jingrui 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 frequent recipient of recognition, including the 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2025 Amazon Research Award, three IBM Faculty Awards, multiple best/distinguished paper awards, and, more recently, induction into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society.
She has also 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. Jingrui students rank her as an excellent teacher and is directly involved in developing the next generation of information professionals as the director of the Master of Science in Information Management program. Additionally, He holds several affiliations across campus
“This award recognizes the collaborative work achieved alongside my mentors, colleagues, partners, and students. I am immensely grateful for the support and numerous opportunities that have been offered to me through the iSchool, CDA, and AIFARMS. I hope that this award will help build new partnerships on and off campus, to jointly advance AI research and to unlock its potential in sustainability, agriculture and other scientific fields,“ says He.
Wendy Yang, a professor of plant biology, oversees research in terrestrial biogeochemistry and ecosystem ecology, focusing 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, the Center for Digital Agriculture, and the AIFARMS Institute.
“I am honored to be recognized for achievements made possible through the team culture that permeates Illinois. Tackling questions about complex plant-soil-microbe interactions relevant to climate change mitigation and sustainable agriculture requires interdisciplinary collaborative efforts. In particular, the team science approach cultivated by CABBI and AIFARMS has enabled my research program to thrive,” says Yang.
Read this press release by the UI News Bureau for the full list of 2026-2027 University Scholars.