School of Information Sciences

Noble honored with Faculty Scholar Award

[image1-right]GSLIS affiliated faculty member Safiya U. Noble (MS ’09, PhD ’12) has been honored with the 2014 Faculty Scholar Award by the University of Illinois Women’s Resources Center (WRC). This award recognizes scholarship that contributes to the advancement of feminism, promotes justice and equity, and supports anti-oppression education.

Noble was honored for her work to reveal the role of technology as a reflection and reinforcement of cultural norms and value systems. “Her community work and scholarship on the representations of people of color—and oppression, power, and privilege more broadly—contribute to critical knowledge on the production of transnational black labor and contemporary barriers in the way of racial and social justice,” said Rachel Storm, WRC assistant director, who introduced Noble at the Women’s Awards Celebration on May 1.

Noble is an assistant professor of media and cinema studies and faculty affiliate to GSLIS, the Institute for Communications Research, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on digital media platform design and social informatics, representation of people of color and women in commercial search and social media systems, and information policy. Her work also includes STEM barriers for African American women and girls.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Kraus wins 2026 Pulitzer Prize Award in Fiction

iSchool alumnus and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus (MSLIS '05) has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Angel Down. Kraus, a prolific writer whose works span several genres—children's fiction, horror, science fiction, graphic novels, and comics—learned the good news last week.

Daniel Kraus 2026

Raji invited to join UN Working Expert Group

PhD student Mubarak Raji has been invited to join the Working Expert Group on AI Governance Interoperability. This group operates under the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies' new AI Governance for Humanity Lab. It supports the Secretary-General's High-level Advisory Body on AI by providing evidence-based analysis for the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will be held in July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Mubarak Raji headshot

Faculty and staff recognized with inaugural iSchool awards

The iSchool recognized faculty and staff for their contributions to teaching and outstanding service to the School at a ceremony on May 6. Interim Dean Emily Knox presented plaques to the inaugural recipients of the Faculty Teaching Award, Adjunct Teaching Award, and Staff Excellence Award.

Paper by He's lab recognized at ICLR 2026 workshop

The iDEA-iSAIL Joint Laboratory at the University of Illinois received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models Workshop for their paper, "RAG Over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-State Retrieval, and Benchmarking." Paper authors include lab members Jingrui He, professor and MSIM program director; Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, and Zihao Li, computer science PhD students; Jiaru Zou, computer science MS student; Dongqi Fu, alum; as well as Jiawei Han, professor of computer science, and Yada Zhu, IBM collaborator. Chen gave an oral presentation of the research at the workshop, which was held last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was selected out of 206 accepted papers at the workshop.

Jingrui He

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top