Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology

Established in 2007, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) is an interdisciplinary institute dedicated to transformative research and technology in life sciences using team-based strategies to tackle grand societal challenges. The IGB serves as a centralized location for biological and biotechnological research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with work ranging from basic research that expands the horizons of human knowledge to applied research that builds on this foundational knowledge to create new technologies.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a hub of transdisciplinary research and digital scholarship where University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students, and collaborators from around the globe, unite to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. The soybean canopy model above was developed at the Center, which provides integrated cyberinfrastructure—computing, software, data, networking, and visualization resources and expertise that are essential to the work of scientists, engineers, and scholars at the University of Illinois and across the country. Established in 1986 as one of the original sites of the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program, NCSA is supported by the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, the National Science Foundation, and grants from other federal agencies.

SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) is an innovative facility for growing crops under production field conditions in an atmosphere that has higher levels of carbon dioxide and ozone, higher temperature and altered soil water availability. SoyFACE was designed to discover the effects of atmospheric change on the agronomy and productivity of Midwestern crops as well as to find solutions that will lead to crops better adapted to this future.

Energy Farm

The Energy Farm at the University of Illinois is the world’s largest outdoor research center devoted to bioenergy crops. The farm has established plots of Miscanthus, switchgrass, restored mixed prairie, and a corn-soybean rotation planted in replicated plots within blocks.

• WIMOVAC model is a modular mathematical model of the carbon balance of vegetation that allows prediction of responses to climate change. It is applicable to a wide range of vegetation and soil types and a user-friendly experimental tool.

• Biofuel Ecophysiological Traits and Yields Database (BETY-db) has been developed to support research, agriculture, and policy by synthesizing available information on potential biofuel crops.

• The Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) bioinformatics tool is an integrated workflow management system to handle the numerous streams of data, and data assimilation statistical framework in order to synthesize the data with an Ecosystem Demography model.