The iSchool is pleased to announce its first Research and Scholarship Awards, given to one faculty member at each of the three career stages: distinguished, advanced career, and early career. Each award, which includes $5,000 for professional development, recognizes the recipient’s outstanding accomplishments or professional promise in the case of early career scholars in the coming year that might best be enhanced by the award. Scholars are selected by Interim Dean Emily Knox on recommendation of the School’s Executive Committee.
Congratulations to the inaugural class of 2026:
Distinguished Research Scholar: Dong Wang
Through his Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and his research team explore the intersections of human and artificial intelligence, including human-centered AI, agentic AI, social media, social informatics, and crowdsourcing/crowdsensing.
Most recently, he and two of his lab students presented at the ACM Web Conference in Dubai: one project concerned with the security of photo-protection methods, and the second examining how well AI models handle clear versus ambiguous medical questions.
His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Google Faculty Research Award, and Best Paper Awards at both the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining and the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium.
Advanced Career Scholar: Jessie Chin
Associate Professor Jessie Chin’s research focuses on the interaction of humans with contemporary information technologies, including understanding and optimizing human performance in complex cognitive activities such as information search, learning, and creativity work.
Her Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) Lab seeks to understand human cognition as it interacts with evolving technologies. She has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Facilitating Learning Excellence Award, and the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award. She has received excellence ratings by her students three times since arriving in 2019.
Early Career Scholar: Emily Maemura
Assistant Professor Emily Maemura studies information organization on the internet and the categorical work necessary to make information usable and available for life in an online world. She teaches courses on digital preservation and also supervises independent study students.
Maemura, who joined the iSchool in 2021, has received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a Beta Phi Mu Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. A recent project, "Envisioning Critical Futures for Archives as Data," on which Maemura and Jessica Lapp of the University of Toronto serve as principal investigators, was one of four initiatives selected for funding through a partnership between the University of Illinois System and the University of Toronto. The project explores the collection, manipulation, storage, visualization, extraction, and interpretation of sociocultural data from historical records.