Doctoral candidates Yuanxi Fu and Lan Li have received Beta Phi Mu's 2025 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship awards for their ongoing dissertation research at the iSchool. This prestigious award honors four doctoral students in library and information science, information studies, informatics, or a related field. Fellowship recipients are awarded $3,000.
Fu successfully defended her dissertation proposal, "Unreliability Propagation in Science: Conceptual Foundations and Mitigation Measures," in February 2025. Her committee includes Associate Professor Jodi Schneider (chair and director of research), Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch, Associate Professor Peter Darch, Professor Bertram Ludäscher, and Professor Allen Renear.
Her dissertation examines unreliability propagation, the spreading of unreliability in scientific research mediated by reusable resources such as data and computer code. Unreliability propagation is a systemic threat to research quality. The dissertation will clarify the nature of unreliability propagation and suggest mitigation measures.
In April 2024, Li successfully defended her dissertation proposal, "Towards More Transparent, Reusable, and Purpose-Driven Data Cleaning." Her committee includes Professor Bertram Ludäscher (chair), Professor Allen Renear, Associate Professor Vetle Torvik, and Teaching Assistant Professor Craig Willis.
Her dissertation investigates how to improve the transparency, reusability, and automation of data cleaning workflows. By capturing human-curated processes and integrating large language models, it proposes frameworks and tools that make data cleaning more interpretable, traceable, and scalable—advancing both human understanding and AI-assisted automation in data preparation tasks.