School of Information Sciences

Johnson elected president of IAP

Office Support Specialist Dimitria Johnson has been elected president of Illinois Administrative Professionals (IAP, formerly known as The Secretariat), an organization for University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign employees in certain Civil Service classifications. She began her one-year term on July 1.

Over the course of her 22 years at the University of Illinois, Johnson has worked at the McKinley Health Center, Division of General Studies, and School of Information Sciences. As a member of the Admissions team at the iSchool, Johnson's primary duties include processing applications and communicating with prospective students.

Since joining the IAP in 2019, Johnson has served on the Executive Board as co-chair of the Membership and Mentorship Committee. One of her goals for the upcoming year is to expand the mentoring program.

"Having someone who you can turn to when you have question or concern about your job or a personal issue is very beneficial," said Johnson. "In addition to meeting amazing people from all over campus, IAP members can participate in professional development opportunities such as networking socials and Career Connections luncheons."

This year, IAP is celebrating its 75th anniversary—a great time to join, according to Johnson.

"I am so excited to be a part of such a wonderful organization," she said. "I encourage Civil Service staff members who are eligible to join IAP to contact us for more information."

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers to present work at Technocracy Conference

This week, iSchool PhD students and faculty will present their research at the Technocracy Conference. Hosted by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois on March 5–6, the conference will begin with a panel of graduate student papers and continue the following day with invited speakers and a keynote. All events will take place at the Levis Faculty Center on the Urbana campus. 

New multi-institutional project to use AI to represent past historical periods

A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning," was recently selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. The $800,000 grant will be split among four institutions: Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of British Columbia, and McGill University. Professor Ted Underwood will serve as the principal investigator for the portion of the project at Illinois.

Ted Underwood

Wang group to present at WSDM26

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. WSDM is a premier international conference in web search, data mining, and AI, known for its highly selective acceptance rates. This year, the acceptance rate for the main track of the conference was only 16 percent. 

Dong Wang

New NSF award supports innovative role-playing game approach to strengthening research security in academia

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) award will support an innovative effort in the School of Information Sciences to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. 

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Mariana Guerrero

Eight iSchool master's students have been named 2025–2026 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Mariana Guerrero earned a bachelor's degree in Spanish language and literature from Rockford University.

Mariana Guerrero

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