School of Information Sciences

Seven iSchool students appointed to the Library of Congress Junior Fellows Program

The Library of Congress announced the appointment of 37 undergraduate, graduate students, and recent graduates to its Junior Fellows Program, including seven students from the iSchool. 

The Junior Fellows Program—a signature initiative of the Library since 1991—is a paid, 10-week annual summer internship program that enables students and recent graduates to gain career experience by working with analog and digital collections and supporting the services of the world’s largest library. 

This year's cohort will contribute to 33 mission-driven projects, including "Music and the Arts as Vehicles for History, Civics, and Democracy" and "Veterans History Project Jukebox: Reaching and Teaching New Library Connectors." With guidance from project mentors, fellows will be exposed to a broad spectrum of library work, including reference, access, public programming, copyright, preservation, and information technology.

The cohort will present its findings and accomplishments via a capstone Display Day event on July 16. 

The 2025 fellows at Illinois are: 

  • Abigail Bowers
  • Colin Hochstetler
  • Doxey Kamara
  • Sara Mercurio
  • Kailyn Slater
  • Daniel Wu
  • Ruzhen Zhang 
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

PhD student Meng Li wins iSchool T-shirt design contest

PhD student Meng Li's research focuses on neuro-symbolic AI, with an emphasis on using syntactic analysis and large language models (LLMs) to understand Python notebooks. This cutting-edge research keeps Li "super busy" for much of the term, but in August, she took a brief break from her work and shifted her focus to designing the winning entry for the iSchool T-shirt contest.

While the idea of the design "just popped into my mind," Li has been thinking about the contest for years.

Meng Li wears the T-shirt with her winning design. The shirt is dark blue, with a hand-sketched wave in white, while the figure and surf board are in Illini Orange.

Paper by He's lab honored at ICCV 2025 workshop

Professor Jingrui He's lab received an outstanding paper award at the Multi-Modal Reasoning for Agentic Intelligence Workshop, which was held during the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025) last month in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

Jingrui He

Jiang defends dissertation

PhD candidate Xiaoliang Jiang successfully defended his dissertation, "Identifying Place Names in Scientific Writing Based on Language Models, Linked Data, and Metadata," on November 10. 

Xiaoliang Jiang

Vaez Afshar named APT Student Scholar

Informatics PhD student Sepehr Vaez Afshar has been named a Student Scholar by the Association for Preservation Technology (APT). Each year, around ten students are selected worldwide for the scholarship program based on the quality and innovation of their research abstracts, as well as their contribution to the field of preservation technology. Scholars are paired with mentors from the APT College of Fellows, prepare and present their research during the association's annual conference, and enjoy opportunities for long-term professional networking and mentorship within the preservation community.

Sepehr Vaez Afshar

iSchool well represented at ASIS&T 2025

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the 88th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held on November 14-18 in Arlington, Virginia. ASIS&T will also host a Virtual Satellite Meeting on December 11-12. 

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top