University of Illinois

University of Illinois main campus at Urbana-Champaign; land-grant with state and federal support; coeducational; chartered 1867, opened 1868 as Illinois Industrial Univ., renamed 1885. It pioneered in vocational education. In 1946 the university began a two-year undergraduate program at Chicago, which in 1965 became the Chicago Circle Campus and in 1982 consolidated with the Medical Center Campus to become the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago. There is also a campus at Springfield, as well as colleges of medicine at Peoria and Rockford and a college of nursing at Moline. The university is a member institution of the Quad-Cities Graduate Study Center at Rock Island.

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) A consortium of US universities founded in 1957 to provide observing facilities for astronomers. AURA operates the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the National Solar Observatory, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the Gemini Observatory. Its headquarters are in Washington, DC. It has 32 members: the universities of Arizona, Boston, California, Chicago, Colorado, Florida, Harvard, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa State, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Montana State, New Mexico State, New York State, North Carolina, Ohio State, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Rutgers, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Yale, plus the California Institute of Technology, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are international affiliates in Australia, Canada, the Canary Islands, Chile, Germany, and the Netherlands. http://www.aura-astronomy.org/