Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

As a Research Experience for Master's Students (REMS) Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information last summer, MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell worked with Oliver Haimson, assistant professor at Michigan, on a research project about trans technology design. One of the papers that resulted from their research, "Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions," has been accepted for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). Additional coauthors and research team members include Michigan graduate students Denny Starks and Zu Weinger.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

This Is MY Fort! and What Is Inside THIS Box?, written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Olivier Tallec, and published by Scholastic Press, are the winners of the 2020 Gryphon Award for Children's Literature.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

Whitney McComas joined the iSchool on January 8 as an instructional technology support specialist. She comes to the School from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where she worked as the Moodle service manager and an educational technology specialist for Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts and Sciences (ATLAS). 

The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."

For more than a century, the iSchool has been, and continues to be, a top-tier school for preparing leaders for the library and information professions. Now the iSchool is pleased to announce the establishment of a new endowed professorship, the Professorship in the History of Libraries and the Information Professions. The professorship was spearheaded by Laurel A. Grotzinger (MS '58, PhD '64), who passed away in 2017; Don (PhD '72) and Avis Davis; and Mark (PhD '83) and Barbara Tucker.

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, senior lecturer at the Australian National University, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for a two-year term through 2021. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. Each will give at least one lecture during their appointment.

According to Leep student Robyn Whitlock, the iSchool's school librarian licensure program has done "an amazing job" of preparing her for a career as a school librarian. Her advice to students considering school librarianship is "go for it!" As she nears the end of her program, Whitlock "couldn't be more excited about the future."