The NIU Family Health, Wellness and Literacy Center, expected to open this fall along DeKalb’s “health corridor” in the former Monsanto building, will serve children and families from DeKalb County and beyond while strengthening supervised experiential learning opportunities for NIU students in each of the three academic programs.
NIU’s Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic treats more than 2,000 people each year with innovative assessments and treatment for a wide array of speech, language, reading and hearing problems.
NIU’s Department of Communicative Disorders tests the hearing of an average of 800 newborn babies a year at Kishwaukee Community Hospital.
With $13 million in grants from DCFS, the NIU Center for Child Welfare and Education is working to keep abused and neglected children from falling through the cracks at school.
The NIU College of Engineering and Engineering Technology is a leading partner in EIGERlab, a facility in Rockford dedicated to developing new manufacturing technologies for use in the development of next-generation military vehicles.
NIU is creating an ultra-fast, fiber-optic communications network that will bring next-generation technology to the northern Illinois region.
Dubbed “NIUNet,” the roughly 175-mile fiber optic loop is expected to be a huge boon to research and economic development efforts. The network also could advance state-of-the-art health care technology, benefit area schools and help keep sought-after high tech jobs from leaving the region for more “connected” communities on either coast.
NIU is home to the Interactive Illinois Report Card, a Web-based tool NIU created and maintains that helps teachers, school districts and parents make sense of mountains of materials on student performance.
The IIRC helps schools identify problems earlier, and helps families understand how their schools stack up against others in the state.
Faculty and students in NIU’s Frontier Physics outreach program are working to spark interests in science among school children throughout northern Illinois.
Over the past three years, the traveling road show has presented eye-popping physics demonstrations to some 25,000 K-12 students.
The Department of Geography’s Cartography Lab produces the Illinois Bicycle Map series (9 maps) for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
More than 800,000 bicycle maps have been distributed by IDOT to outdoor enthusiasts and tourists over the past decade.
NIU’s Rapid Optimization of Commercial Knowledge program (NIU-ROCK) is aiding the recovery of the manufacturing community in Rockford, building bridges between faculty and businesses to bring the latest technologies to the factory floor more quickly and help local companies compete for lucrative government contracts.
Fifth-grade boys in Rockford’s Rolling Green Elementary School are reading more, inspired by e-mails from NIU students about books.
As part of Project REAL, the federally funded partnership between NIU, the Rockford Public Schools and Rock Valley College, the e-mail pen pals read the same books and discuss them through the computer.
Graduate students in the NIU Department of Communicative Disorders wrote a successful grant proposal to save an old Works Progress Administration-commissioned canvas that hangs above the DeKalb Public Library’s fireplace. A $5,000 challenge grant was awarded to pay for restoration of the mural.
Literacy Education students from NIU are helping English language learners to achieve literacy in English and to have a good feeling about their native language.
NIU’s program currently serves 107 kindergarten through third-grade students at the public Littlejohn and Cheeseboro elementary schools and the private St. Mary’s School in DeKalb and Archbishop Romero Catholic School in Aurora.
NTC News Tonight, a full-length 10 p.m. news broadcast created by NIU journalism students, has made its debut on Comcast Channel 74.
The commercial-free 20-minute newscast airs Monday through Thursday with next-day repeats at noon Tuesday through Friday.
