In August 2019, the iSchool will welcome Sharon L. Comstock (PhD '12) as a senior lecturer and Inkyung Choi as a lecturer.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

With support from the National Humanities Center, Professor Ted Underwood is examining patterns of human perspective throughout two centuries of literary history. The Center is a residential institute for advanced study in art history, classics, languages and literature, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. In addition to pursuing their own research and writing at the Center, fellows form seminars and study groups with cohorts holding shared research interests.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of new directors for its master's degree programs. Associate Professor Maria Bonn will serve as program director for the MS in library and information science (MS/LIS), and Associate Professor Catherine Blake will serve as program director for the MS in information management (MS/IM). They will begin their three-year terms on May 16.

As the director of artificial intelligence strategy at Benefitfocus, Jen Clark (MS '14) works on leading-edge technology to solve complex data and AI problems. She credits her iSchool coursework with laying the foundation for her career in data science.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jingrui He will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019. She is currently an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University (ASU).

In Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 540), students learn advanced techniques of business research through hands-on experience with real-world clients. This semester, a team of students has been working with entrepreneur Douglass Lee, founder of the startup OneSoftDigm (OSD) and a senior in business at the University of Illinois.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve on the Reproducibility Badging and Definitions Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is a U.S. nonprofit association that develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to facilitate the creation, management, and interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and teaching.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh has been awarded a fellowship from the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). Of the 90 students and early-career professionals in publishing, librarianship, and information science who applied for the fellowship, twelve were selected. According to the SSP, this year's recipients were chosen based on their high level of engagement in their fields and represent a diverse range of skills in scholarly publishing and librarianship.

Cesar Ortega fell in love with libraries at the age of thirteen, when he joined the Aurora (IL) Public Library's Teen Advisory Board. The board was composed of a group of teens from around the city who created programs for the library.