URBANA – Yingbo Zhou is being remembered as a lively young woman with a promising career ahead of her who loved her home country of China as well as the United States.

The 26-year-old University of Illinois graduate student from Changchun, China, died late Monday from injuries she received in a traffic crash on Interstate 74 north of Urbana. A Savoy man has been charged criminally in connection with her death.

She and four friends were on their way to see Niagara Falls near Buffalo, N.Y., over the long Thanksgiving break, said Jon Gant, her adviser and friend.

"Yingbo worked with me since she arrived in August 2008. She was going to graduate in May. She was pursuing a degree in library and information science but specializing in information science and more on the technology side," said Gant, an associate professor in the graduate school of library and information science.

Reached in North Carolina on Wednesday, Gant said he still can't believe that such a vibrant, promising and fun young person is gone.

"She was very talented, very bright and incredible with other people. She was a teaching assistant for geographic information systems. The class was difficult. The students looked up to her," he said of the 24 students in the class, most of whom have been trading e-mails for the last couple of days about how they can help her parents and each other.

Ms. Zhou was also one of seven members of Gant's research team working on building computerized maps and systems for poor communities in the U.S. and developing countries.

"She developed a digital library for mapping data for a country called Sao Tome on the west coast of Africa," Gant said. "It was going exceptionally well. She showed me the prototype two weeks ago."

Aside from her zeal for academics, Ms. Zhou was a fun person with great leadership skills.

After seeing Barack Obama elected president, she decided to run for president of a service group of Chinese students in the graduate school.

"When Obama was running for president, we had a discussion about politics and the use of the Internet. She was so fascinated with the whole process that she decided she would run for the presidency of that group," Gant said. "She never knew it was possible to run for the president of something."

He said she also loved to travel and often made trips to East St. Louis and Chicago with Gant's research team.

"In Chicago, all she wanted to do was touch Lake Michigan," he said. She and her friends were headed for Niagara Falls when the crash occurred, he said.

Just two weeks ago, Gant said, Ms. Zhou had reached another milestone of which she was extremely proud.

"She had joined the UI Ballroom Dancing Club. They had a competition ... and she and her partner came in second place. She would practice her dance moves in class," Gant said, adding the other students encouraged and applauded her acumen on the dance floor.

Ms. Zhou was an only child. Gant said he believes her father is an engineer and her mother some sort of artist. She had last been home to China in the summer, he said.

"She spent six weeks there and had a great time with her family. We teased her that her mom and dad wouldn't let her return. They missed her so much. They were very supportive of her," he said.

Ms. Zhou received undergraduate and graduate degrees in China and was part of a cooperative master's program between the UI and Zhejiang University. Gant said he was encouraging his protege to pursue a doctorate.

"She imagined being in a library and working on digital library systems," Gant said of Ms. Zhou's future plans. "She was a pretty awesome person. I'm blown away she died."