Doctoral candidate Katrina Fenlon successfully defended her dissertation, “Thematic research collections: Libraries and the evolution of alternative scholarly publishing in the humanities,” on September 8.

Professor Michael Twidale, program director for the iSchool's MS in information management, is the 2017 recipient of the Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The award recognizes Twidale's unique teaching contributions through his methods of explaining highly technical material to students in various learning environments.

Thanks to a new online resource for paleoenvironmental data and models under development at Illinois and partner institutions, historian Richard Flint can gauge whether environmental factors played an important role in driving the migration of Pueblo Indians from the Spanish province of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. Using SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), scholars such as Flint and the larger community of archaeologists will be able to discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environments in the recent or remote past.

Jessica Williams (MS '13) joined the School on August 16 as a graduate student coordinator and academic advisor. In this role, she will provide academic advising and program planning for students enrolled in the MS/IM program, as well as work with Michael Twidale, professor and MS/IM program director, and others to continue to evolve the program. 

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her three-year term as a director-at-large will begin on November 1, 2017.

When MS/IM student Rob Callahan isn't participating in an online class, he is out flying helicopters. First Lieutenant Callahan flies H-60 Blackhawks as an aeromedical evacuation officer in the U.S. Army. 

The yt project, an open science environment created to address astrophysical questions through analysis and visualization, has been awarded a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue developing their software project. iSchool Assistant Professor Matthew Turk is leading the project with collaborators.

Alumna and longtime staff member Jill Gengler (MS '99) has been named director of alumni affairs for the iSchool. In her new role, she will manage alumni engagement and programming, collaborating closely with other units in the iSchool and on campus.

A project led by iSchool Professor Les Gasser, "Simulating Social Systems at Scale (SSS)," has laid the groundwork for a prestigious award to a student researcher. Santiago Núñez-Corrales, an Informatics PhD student directed by Gasser, was recently chosen from among several hundred applicants to receive an ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational & Data Science Fellowship.

Several iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at Digital Humanities 2017, the annual conference of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 8-11.