The UI announced that chemical and biomolecular engineering Professor Ying Diao and materials science and engineering professors Qian Chen and Pinshane Huang received the two-year grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. URBANA — You could say that Ying Diao and her research team are reinventing the molecular wheel. "It takes ingenuity to develop new approaches," Diao said of her work to find new avenues for directly assembling functional molecules. But the University of Illinois chemical and biomolecular engineering professor is getting some help with the hefty task. read more