The academic programs within the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, including BAUSP, MUP and MSSUM, have been recently classified as an approved field of study within the U.S. government's official STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields list. UIUC urban planning students on F1 visa who finish the program may participate in 12 months of OPT, and may apply for an additional 24 month extension to their OPT period. More information about the STEM OPT extension can be found through the Office of International Student & Scholar Services.

DURP professors Arnab Chakraborty and Lindsay Braun receive an IDOT grant to help communities plan for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. Read more.

Congratulations to recent PhD graduate, Shruti Syal, for being awarded the 2019 Association for Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Gill-Chin Lim Award for best dissertation on international planning. Shruti's dissertation is entitled A Socio-Ecological Systems Perspective on Planning for Informality: the case of Delhi's stormwater drain-adjacent settlements. The ACSP award committee "considered the innovativeness of her scholarship and the creativity that she demonstrated in spanning disciplinary fields while taking on the issue of informality that planning struggles with across the global South." They were also "impressed by her methodological rigor and quality of her work, as well as its relevance and the applicability of conclusions." Read more.

Hugo Sarmiento, Ph.D., will join DURP as a postdoctoral research associate in August. Hugo's research interests include emerging urban, housing, and land use strategies for climate change adaptation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Read more.