The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has had a long history of supporting access for military veterans to higher education. Disruptive research by faculty in the College of Applied Health Sciences has led to nationally adopted architectural accessibility standards and the first comprehensive program of disability services in higher education. As an ecological convener, the Chez Veterans Center continues this legacy by facilitating a visible program of services, research, and education for military-connected communities. The Office of Research and Educational Programming carries out the research mission by facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration around veteran health that is rooted in practitioner experiences.

Transforming higher education for every student veteran.

We are building a funding portfolio to strategically position the Chez Veterans Center as the national clearinghouse for research on student veterans in higher education. We strive to be the primary developmental resource source for student-facing professionals working with this population. Research connected to veterans is critical to improving the services provided and enhancing the quality of their lives. We provide a challenging environment to explore the effectiveness of new approaches to help veterans transition to higher education settings. The Center is a place to explore innovative transitional methods, develop new technologies, test important questions, and discover treatments from various disciplines. We provide professional development to military student service providers nationally to share these discoveries.

With the power of an R1 research enterprise, we’re interested in tackling the biggest challenges to create societal impact in the field of veteran health.

To achieve this goal, the Chez Veterans Center supports the ecology of research and engagement activities surrounding veteran health and the life course at Urbana-Champaign. Our Center actively collaborates across multiple colleges, providing research development support and the other necessary infrastructure to accelerate an interdisciplinary group of campus researchers focused on veterans, military-connected populations, and their families.

We continue to provide research development support for collaborative research partnerships, as well as through a small grants program, workshops, working groups, and other related programming. We also facilitate workshops designed to help researchers develop the necessary cultural competencies for engaging with military-connected communities. The goal is to improve the research productivity of the College of Applied Health Sciences and campus researchers by reducing cultural barriers and structural burdens associated with the study of military-connected communities. Find out more about these opportunities here.