Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will give a presentation at the Carle Cancer Center in Urbana on May 18. She will give the talk, "Learning Health Systems that Leverage Informatics and Communities of Practice."

Recent graduate Erica Zhang (MS '18) is heading to Arizona to start her new job as a junior taxonomist for Boeing. There she will work with the Information Services team to maintain metadata and controlled vocabularies to facilitate employee access to information.

During the 2018 Python Education Summit, held in conjunction with the PyCon 2018 conference, Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes will discuss how to help new Python learners be successful. PyCon, an annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language, will be held May 9-17 in Cleveland.

The iSchool is proud to announce the promotion of three faculty to associate professor with indefinite tenure: Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke, Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner, and Assistant Professor Emily Knox. Their new appointments will be effective August 16, 2018, pending final approval by the Board of Trustees.

Four iSchool alumni are among the twenty-five professionals selected to participate in the 2018-2019 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Leadership & Career Development Program (LCDP). These new fellows include Sandra Enimil (MS '09), Adebola Fabiku (MS '12), Myung-Ja Han (MS '06), and Thomas Padilla (MS '13). 

The first iSchool Corporate Showcase took place on April 24 at the University of Illinois Research Park. The event, which included a poster session and presentations, introduced employers to the strengths and expertise of information science professionals and celebrated the iSchool’s inaugural class of MS in information management (MS/IM) students. It attracted more than one hundred participants, including corporate partners and iSchool alumni, faculty, staff, and students. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will give the keynote address at the Northeast Ohio Regional Library System's Critical Conversations Mini-conference, Tolerance is Not Enough: Libraries Respond to Hate, which will be held on May 3 in Twinsburg, Ohio. The interactive event will focus on helping library staff assess their own cultural identities and biases and on looking at how these biases impact service.

The University Library has named iSchool affiliated faculty member Timothy W. Cole, head of the Mathematics Library, for the Elaine and Allen Avner Professorship in Interdisciplinary Research. Cole holds this honor as of April 16, 2018, continuing for five years.

The professorship was established with a gift from longtime Library Friend Allen Avner in November 2017. Cole will carry out research in fields connected to the application of information technologies in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary fields of research.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will present his recent work with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) on April 30 at Harvard Library. Downie is codirector of HTRC, a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to text found in the HathiTrust (HT) Digital Library.

Sarah T. Roberts (PhD '14), assistant professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been named a 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Roberts joins thirty other Carnegie Fellows from across the nation as a recipient of what are often referred to as the "brainy awards" and will receive a $200,000 stipend from the Carnegie Corporation in support of her work. Roberts was selected along with the other 2018 fellows from among 270 applicants.