Blake promoted to professor

Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake, Professor

Catherine Blake has been promoted to the position of professor in the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2021.

Blake's research seeks to accelerate science and inform policy by automatically extracting and summarizing claims reported in the scientific literature. Her automated approaches are informed by her award-winning study of human information synthesis behaviors. She has introduced methods to summarize comparison claims and extract outcomes that operate at a noun phrase level rather than an entire sentence. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Environmental Health Perspectives, and elsewhere.

"Peer-reviewed journals capture the latest findings from the greatest minds, but it's not enough to just organize information: we need to synthesize evidence and get the aggregated findings into the hands of decision makers," said Blake.

Blake leads the Illinois contingent of the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH), which is housed in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and includes a network of experts from across the twelve states who catalyze data science efforts to collect, manage, and leverage complex information to improve life in the Midwest. She also holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

In addition to her research, Blake has contributed to the iSchool's educational programs. She introduced a graduate specialization in socio-technical data analytics (SODA) in 2010, which was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Work on this project formed the basis of the current data analytics track in the MS in information management, for which Blake currently serves as the program director. Since 2011, she has served as associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship. She also directs the Information Sciences concentration of the campuswide MS in Bioinformatics program.

Prior to coming to Illinois, Blake was a faculty member at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; a research scientist; and an applications programmer. She holds an MS and PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, and a BS and MS in computer science from the University of Wollongong, Australia.

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New book explores how AI is reshaping cultural heritage

Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. 

Jung to join the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yonghan Jung will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2025, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 

Yonghan Jung

Aubin Le Quéré to join the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Marianne Aubin Le Quéré will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2026, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Aubin Le Quéré is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Marianne Aubin Le Quere