Professor Catherine Blake has been named associate dean for academic affairs. In this new role, she provides leadership and oversight for academic programs, including program development, curriculum coordination, and continuous improvement of educational experiences.
"I am very excited to be a part of the iSchool's long legacy of innovation with respect to how faculty engage with students. For example, many people have only recently become familiar with online learning, but the iSchool entered that space back in 1996, with a program that combined residential and online experiences," said Blake.
Blake's previous curricula development includes the socio-technical data analytics (SODA) specialization that evolved into the MSIM. Her leadership roles in the iSchool have included serving as program director for the MS in information management (MSIM) and MS in Bioinformatics programs as well as associate director for Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS).
"Many of our faculty are thinking deeply about how to mobilize information to help communities, and I am really looking forward to being more involved with how that expertise manifests in our programs," she said.
Blake will continue her appointment as a Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.
Blake holds a PhD and MS in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, and an MS and BS in computer science from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research in text mining seeks to support intentional human decision making from multiple streams of evidence and includes automated methods to detect outcomes, comparisons, and claims from medicine, toxicology, and epidemiology. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science and is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Informatics, Center for Health Informatics, and the Personalized Nutrition Initiative.