The iSchool at Illinois announces the appointment of three tenure-track faculty, Jiaqi Ma, Meicen Sun, and Haohan Wang, and four specialized faculty, Brandon Batzloff, David Charles, Renee Hendricks, and Adam Rusch.
"The iSchool is pleased to welcome these talented new faculty," said Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos. "Their expertise will enhance our research and teaching portfolio, which has expanded in recent years due to the tremendous growth of our faculty and their interdisciplinary interests—all of which center on how information can benefit society."
Compared to four years ago, the total number of iSchool tenure-track and specialized faculty has nearly doubled. These individuals and their areas of research are listed below.
August 2023
Jiaqi Ma, Assistant Professor
Understanding and improving machine learning for complex real-world data, such as networks, rankings, and data with missing values; machine learning problems motivated by human-related scenarios, such as social networks, recommender systems, and healthcare.
Meicen Sun, Assistant Professor
The political economy of information and the effect of information policy on the future of innovation and state power.
August 2022
Brandon Batzloff, Teaching Assistant Professor
Social systems dynamics, human dimensions of the climate crisis, implicit cognitive measurements, political cognition, and neural networks.
David Charles, Teaching Assistant Professor
Future of work for information professionals, strategic change with innovation and technology, innovation culture leadership, business information consulting, and coaching information and technology leaders.
Renee Hendricks, Teaching Assistant Professor
Public health informatics, explainable and interpretable algorithms, fuzzy logic, process mining, and human-computer interaction.
Adam Rusch, Teaching Assistant Professor
Network information systems, sociotechnical information systems, social aspects of information technology, and how blockchain technologies and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) might be usable for blockchain-related research and translational work.
Haohan Wang, Assistant Professor
The development of trustworthy machine learning methods for computational biology and healthcare applications, such as decoding the genomic language of Alzheimer’s disease; statistical analysis and deep learning methods, with an emphasis on data analysis using methods least influenced by spurious signals.
January 2022
Christopher Lueg, Professor
Human computer interaction and information behavior with a special interest in embodiment—the view that perception, action, and cognition are intrinsically linked—and what it means when designing for others.
Emily Maemura, Assistant Professor
Web archives, infrastructure studies, digital preservation, digital curation, data curation, data practices.
August 2021
Ryan Cordell, Associate Professor
Book history, book arts, print culture, bibliography, digital humanities, text and data mining, machine learning, and critical making.
Sarah Park Dahlen, Associate Professor
Children’s and young adult literature, Asian American youth literature, youth services librarianship, transracial Asian adoption, and diversity in the information profession.
Zoe LeBlanc, Assistant Professor
Digital humanities and digital history; cultural heritage and digital libraries; histories of information and data; anti-colonial and postcolonial histories; cultural analytics and computational social science.
JooYoung Seo, Assistant Professor
Accessible computing/data science, ability design human-computer interaction, inclusive Learning Sciences/STEM+C education across dis/abilities, and accessible health informatics.
Dong Wang, Associate Professor
Social (human-centric) sensing, computing and intelligence; human-centered AI; big data analytics; reliable information distillation systems; human-cyber-physical systems; edge computing; Internet of Things/Everything (IoT/IoE); smart cities.
August 2020
Jill Naiman, Teaching Assistant Professor
Data visualization, scientific digitization with machine learning methods, image processing.
Madelyn Sanfilippo, Assistant Professor
Governance in sociotechnical systems as designed, practiced, and experienced; evaluating technology governance outcomes; social inequality in experiences with technology; information law, policy, and inequality; social aspects of privacy, data, platforms, and personalization; social informatics.
Kevin Trainor, Senior Lecturer
Common elements of story-based techniques as used in systems analysis, interaction design, agile software development, and data science storytelling; adaptability of modern software development methods to the needs of data science practitioners.
August 2019
Jessie Chin, Assistant Professor
Adaptation to information proliferation, coupling cognitive systems, digital health, and health informatics.
Inkyung Choi, Teaching Assistant Professor
Knowledge organization, library classification, classification on the web, user-oriented approach, comparative cultural studies, and intercultural communication.
Sharon Comstock, Teaching Assistant Professor
The application of asset-based principles and Community of Inquiry (CoI) theory in mixed-methods outcomes-based design and evaluation in formal and informal learning environments; attendant information behaviors as necessary collective-impact infrastructure, focusing on those that benefit young people.
Jingrui He, Associate Professor
Designing, building, and testing a suite of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize, and predict real-world data by means of statistical machine learning.
David Hopping, Teaching Assistant Professor
Social and community informatics, sociological theory of human rights, relational sociology, and action research and public policy relating to digital inclusion and digital literacy.
Yun Huang, Associate Professor
Human-computer interaction, social computing, mobile computing, computer-supported cooperative work, human-AI interaction, conversational agents, social media, and crowdsourcing.
Halil Kilicoglu, Associate Professor
Biomedical informatics, natural language processing, computational semantics, literature-based knowledge discovery, scholarly communication, science of science, and scientific reproducibility.
Melissa Ocepek, Assistant Professor
Everyday information behavior, information behavior, cultural theory, critical theory, food studies, leisure studies, and ethnography.
Eunice E. Santos, Professor and Dean
Computational social science with an appreciation for the social and human aspects of the information sciences; computationally intensive methods to understand the behavior of social networks and communities with insights related to community resilience, disaster response, and belief and opinion change.
Sara L. Schwebel, Professor
Children’s and young adult literature, history of education and literacy, history of childhood, history pedagogy, public history, digital humanities, and historical fiction.
Yang Wang, Associate Professor
Usable privacy/security, data-driven privacy/security, inclusive design, explainable AI, human-computer interaction, social computing, ubiquitous computing, and computer-supported cooperative work.
As demonstrated above, growth in faculty has greatly expanded the breadth and depth of the iSchool’s research. Learn more about the iSchool's faculty and research.