The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of three specialized faculty members. Craig Willis and Yang Zhang will join the School as teaching assistant professors, and Dave Mussulman will join the School as a lecturer.
Mussulman is currently an instructional technology facilitator in the Grainger College of Engineering, where he works as a consultant to help faculty explore and adopt IT solutions for their teaching and learning. He has served as an adjunct professor for the iSchool, teaching Introduction to Technology in LIS (IS 590) and Race, Gender, and Information Technology (IS 308). Mussulman also has experience as a software carpentry workshop instructor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and University of Illinois Research Park. He earned his BS in computer science and MSLIS from Illinois.
Willis has worked as a research programmer for the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and research programmer/senior research programmer for the NCSA. His research interests include data management and curation, computational reproducibility and transparency, scientific metadata, and information storage and retrieval. Willis will be collaborating with Professor Allen Renear on updating the Foundations of Data Curation (CS 598) course that will be delivered via Coursera for students enrolled in the University's online Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS) program. He holds a BA in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, MS in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and PhD from the iSchool at Illinois.
Zhang has served as a postdoctoral research associate in the iSchool for the past year. In spring 2023, he taught Database Design and Prototyping (IS 455). His research focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence and social sensing. He holds a BE in software engineering from Wuhan University, MS in data science from Indiana University Bloomington, and PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Notre Dame.