School of Information Sciences

iSchool instructors ranked as excellent

Forty-nine iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2020. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

Faculty and instructors appearing on the list include Barbara Alvarez, Masooda Bashir, Nigel Bosch, Bobby Bothmann, Emilie Butt, Anita Say Chan, Jessie Chin, Sharon Comstock, Anne Craig, J. Stephen Downie, Karen Egan, Anna Hartmann, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Elizabeth Hoiem, Jeanne Holba-Puacz, David Hopping, Jimi Jones, Halil Kilicoglu, Emily Knox, Ellen Knutson, Kyungwon Koh, Katie Chamberlain Kritikos, Kathryn La Barre, Rachel M. Magee, Bonnie Mak, Kate McDowell, Benjamin Mead-Harvey, Jill Naiman, Caroline Nappo, Melissa Newell, Melissa Ocepek, Judith Pintar, Kate Quealy-Gainer, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Jodi Schneider, Ruth Shasteen, Yoo-Seong Song, Jennifer Hain Teper, Carol Tilley, Tony Torres, Kevin Trainor, Matthew Turk, Michael Twidale, Ted Underwood, John Weible, Karen Wickett, Walter Wilson, Martin Wolske, and Melissa Wong.

Alvarez, Butt, Craig, Downie, Hinchliffe, Koh, La Barre, Naiman, Ocepek, and Wong received the highest ranking of "outstanding."

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Cloonan to deliver iSchool Convocation

Michèle Cloonan (MS '84, PhD '88), dean and professor emerita in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, will deliver the 2026 iSchool Convocation address on Sunday, May 17, at 1:30 p.m. at the Activities and Recreation Center. For those who would like to watch the ceremony online, live video will be available as well as archived for future viewing.

Michèle Cloonan 2026

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

iSchool to shape development of cultural heritage documentation standards

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formally joined the special interest group (SIG) that leads the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ISO standard (21127:2023) for the exchange and integration of wide-ranging scientific and scholarly documentation about the past. 

Nicola Carboni

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