iSchool recognizes 2025 PhD milestones

The School of Information Sciences is proud to recognize the 2025 academic milestones of our PhD students.

"These achievements reflect not only individual dedication but also the collaborative, interdisciplinary spirit that defines the iSchool," said Kyu-Been Chun, PhD coordinator. "We look forward to more exams coming up this spring and hope to see many of you joining these sessions and supporting our students!"

Congratulations to the following PhD students:

Final Examinations 

• Michelle Bak, "Promoting a Healthy and Comprehensive Diet through Theory-Driven Large Language Models-Based Agents" Committee: Associate Professor Jessie Chin, Research Scientist Ian Brooks, Professor Dong Wang, Affiliate Associate Professor Jana Diesner, and Suma Bhat (Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois)
• Yingjun Guan, "Disambiguating Academic Institution Names: A Comprehensive Study of Authority Files, Linguistic Variations, and Computational Evaluation in PubMed Affiliations" Committee: Associate Professor Vetle Torvik, Professor Bertram Ludäscher, Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Professor Allen Renear
• Yingying Han, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S." Committee: Professor Anita Say Chan, Teaching Associate Professor Martin Wolske, Associate Professor Karen Wickett, Affiliate Professor Clara Chu, and Michelle Caswell (School of Information Studies, UCLA)
• Xiaoliang Jiang, "Identifying Place Names in Scientific Writing Based on Language Models, Linked Data, and Metadata" Committee: Associate Professor Vetle Torvik, Professor J. Stephen Downie, Associate Professor Nigel Bosch, and Assistant Professor Meicen Sun
• Jean Kanengoni, "Measuring Up: Public Libraries Discovering Their Impact in Zimbabwe" Committee: Interim Dean and Professor Emily Knox, Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Teresa Barnes (Department of History, University of Illinois), and Valeda Dent (Vice Provost of Libraries, Emory University)
• Smirity Kaushik, "Digital Trust, Safety, and Privacy in the Age of Emerging Technologies" Committee: Professor Yang Wang, Camille Cobb (Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois), Assistant Professor Madelyn Sanfilippo, Professor Michael Twidale, and Yixin Zou (Human-Centered Security and Privacy group, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy)
• Zachary Kilhoffer, "Human Factors in the Standardization of AI Governance: Improving the Design of Risk Management Standards for Ethical AI" Committee: Professor Yang Wang, Assistant Professor Madelyn Sanfilippo, Associate Professor Masooda Bashir, and Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma
• Lan Li, "Transparent, Reusable, and Purpose-Driven Data Cleaning" Committee: Professor Bertram Ludäscher, Professor Allen Renear, Associate Professor Vetle Torvik, and Teaching Assistant Professor Craig Willis
• Apratim Mishra, "Hype and Diversity in Science: A Bibliometric Study of Biomedical Literature" Committee: Associate Professor Vetle Torvik, Affiliate Associate Professor Jana Diesner, Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Jinseok Kim (School of Information, University of Michigan)
• Vairavan Murugappan, "A Framework for Large-Scale Dynamic Social Network Analysis with Application to Key Actor Analysis" Committee: Professor Eunice E. Santos, Bill Gropp (Siebel School of Computing and Data Science), Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Ali Cinar (College of Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology)
• Jana M. Perkins, "Scholarship Writ Large: Professionalization in English Literary Scholarship from 1940 to the Present" Committee: Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Tess McNulty (Department of English, University of Illinois), and Professor Ted Underwood
• Suresh Subramanian, "A Unified Computational Framework for Modeling Health Policy Adoption in Complex Real-World Environments" Committee: Professor Eunice E. Santos, E. Bigsby (Department of Communications, University of Illinois), Associate Professor Jessie Chin, Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Ali Cinar (College of Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology)
• Liang (Jackie) Tang, "The Role of Proximity in Human-Agent Trust" Committee: Associate Professor Masooda Bashir, Daniel G. Morrow (Department of Psychology, University of Illinois), Associate Professor Nigel Bosch, and Christopher Ball (Department of Journalism, University of Illinois)
• Andrew Zalot, "'Tweet of the Town:' Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans" Committee: Assistant Professor Rachel M. Magee, Interim Dean and Professor Emily Knox, Professor Kathleen McDowell, and Marianne Martens (School of Information, Kent State University)
• Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, "A Pragmatic and Human-Centered Approach to Promoting Software Accessibility: Design, Education, Governance" Committee: Assistant Professor Madelyn Sanfilippo, Associate Professor Rachel Adler, Professor Ted Underwood, Associate Professor Jessie Chin, Professor Michael Twidale, and Xin Tong (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou))

Preliminary Examinations

• Rawdah Alfadhley, "The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear: A Qualitative Study on the Privacy Policies of Libraries in the GCC States"
• Jack Brighton, "Parasitic Platforms and the Crisis in Local News"
• Haocong Cheng, "Towards Accessible Video-Based Learning for D/deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Learners Using AI Technologies"
• Siyao Cheng, "Enhancing U.S. Undergraduates’ Copyright Literacy with a Learner-Centric Pedagogical Tool"
• Abhinav Choudhry, "Helping Older Adults’ Everyday Lives through Technology: Applications in Health and Finance"
• Daniel Evans, "Quantifying the Press: Leveraging AI to Remediate Historical Newspaper Directories"
• Yuanxi Fu, "Unreliability Propagation in Science: Conceptual Foundations and Mitigation Measures"
• Jamillah R. Gabriel, "Assessing the Information Needs and Seeking Behaviors of Black Adults within Libraries, Archives, and Museums"
• Jim Hahn, "Algorithmic BIBFRAME and Social Signaling"
• Muhammad Hassan, "From Smart Homes to Smart Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges of Adapting the Matter Standard for IoMT"
• Lan Jiang, "Effective and Fair Writing Assessment with Large Language Models"
• Jinmo Kim, "Resolving Ambiguity, Revealing Dynamics: NLP Approaches to Funding Analysis in Library and Information Science"
• Mengfei Lan, "Large Language Models for Argument Mining in Biomedical Literature"
• HaeJin Lee, "Human-Centered Explainable AI to Support Metacognitive Strategies in Computer-Based Learning Environments"
• Gaozheng Liu, "Reading Order-Aware OCR for Visually Rich Historical Documents: Towards Better Accessibility and Analysis"
• Deepanshu Malhotra, "Author Contributor Roles: A Bibliographic Data Mining and Network Science Study"
• Shufan Ming, "Enhancing Accessibility of Biomedical Literature with Knowledge-Guided Large Language Models"
• Pranav Pamidighantam, "Predicting Influence and Susceptibility of Actors Using Community-Based Approaches in Large-Scale, Attributed, and Dynamic Networks"
• Jana M. Perkins, "Scholarship Writ Large: A Data-Rich Analysis of Professionalization in English Literary Scholarship from 1940 to the Present"
• Steph Posey, "Matrix of Resistance: Pedagogies in Digital Organizing"
• Yunzhe Qi, "Principled Frameworks for Structure-Aware Interactive Machine Learning"
• Malik Salami, "A Model to Identify and Study Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Coauthorship Networks"
• Tre Tomaszewski, "The Hidden Lives of Social Machines: How Cognitive System Designs Influence Agent Behavior in Synthetic Societies"
• Chris Wiley, "Black Queer and Trans Men Online: Information Practices, Visibility, and Platform Constraints"
• Ziwei (Maggie) Wu, "Harmonizing Fairness and Utility in Machine Learning"
• Yilin Xia, "Explainable Argumentation through Declarative Methods: Provenance, Visualization, and Multi-Agent Reasoning"
• Yaman Yu, "Safeguarding and Empowering Youth in the Era of Generative AI"
• Huimin Zeng, "Trustworthy Representation Learning in Federated and Multimodal Foundation Models"

Field Examinations

• Ocean Val Arboniés-Flores, "Caribbean Science and Technology Studies (CSTS)"
• Sydney Benning, "Data Management and Knowledge Dissemination in Cultural Heritage Fields, with an Emphasis on Archaeology"
• Jessica Choi, "Human-Centered AI"
• Puranjani Das, "Information & Knowledge Organization"
• Sarah Griebel, "NLP and Digital Humanities"
• Evan Guerra, "Chemosensory Informatics"
• Gibong Hong, "Biomedical Language Processing"
• Ping-Bang Hu, "Scalable Training Data Attribution"
• Vuyokazi Jamieson, "Youth Literacy & School Libraries in Africa"
• Karen Jenkins, "Info-Seeking Behavior, Health Education, ICTS"
• Sanchita Kamath, "Virtual Reality, Accessibility and Dis/ability Theory, Interaction Design, Conversational Agents and Accessible AI in VR"
• Matthew Kollmer, "Digital Humanities, Cultural Analytics, and Natural Language Processing"
• Theodore Dreyfus Ledford, "Computational Social Epistemology"
• Deepanshu Malhotra, "Science of Science, NLP/Machine Learning, and Networks"
• Ruby Martinez, "Dance in LIS: Intangible Cultural Heritage"
• Joseph Menke, "Biomedical Language Processing"
• Owen Monroe, "Popular Print Analytics"
• Mubarak Raji, "Data Privacy and AI Governance"
• Togzhan Seilkhanova, "Political Economy of Information, Propaganda, and Information Behavior"
• Valentine Ugwuoke, "Intersection of Law, Technology, and Information"
• Tianxin Wei, "Artificial Intelligence"
• Devyn Wilder, "Health Literacy & Critical Race Studies"
• Zhiwen (Jerome) You, "Measuring and Mitigating Hallucinations in Natural Language Generation Tasks"
• Guangchun Zheng, "The Public Library and Literacy; Community Informatics; and Community Centric Approaches in ICT4D"