School of Information Sciences

Wang to join iSchool faculty

Haohan Wang
Haohan Wang, Assistant Professor

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Haohan Wang will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2022, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He recently completed his PhD in computer science through the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

Wang's research focuses on the development of trustworthy machine learning methods for computational biology and healthcare applications, such as decoding the genomic language of Alzheimer's disease. In his work, he uses statistical analysis and deep learning methods, with an emphasis on data analysis using methods least influenced by spurious signals (features that are statistically associated with the target but not causal). In 2019, Wang was recognized as the Next Generation in Biomedicine by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard because of his contributions in dealing with confounding factors with deep learning.

"It is my great pleasure to join the renowned faculty at the iSchool and contribute to science in a world-class institution that values innovation in information science," said Wang. "I'm looking forward to collaborating with colleagues on multiple dimensions and helping improve the trustworthiness of data science methods, to push the frontier of understanding biomedical problems."

"We are extremely proud of our School's expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning," said Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos. "Haohan's work on trustworthy and robust machine learning, with a focus on medical applications, will be a welcome addition to our research enterprise." 

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

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

Downie presents TORCHLITE in Germany

This week, Professor and Executive Associate Dean J. Stephen Downie was a guest speaker at the Herder Institute in Marburg and the University of Göttingen. Downie, who serves as co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), lectured on the HTRC's "Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction" (TORCHLITE) project.

Stephen Downie

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