Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $649,921 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem, Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, and Associate Professor Jodi Schneider are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.

Peter Darch has been promoted to the position of associate professor in the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2023.

Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.

Jingrui He has been promoted to the position of professor in the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2023.

When Kelly Schulz (MSLIS '18) visited the National Gallery of Art in the 5th grade, she immediately knew that she wanted to work there. "At that time, I had no idea what the job would be, but I just knew that I wanted to do it here," she recalled. As fate would have it, Schulz's dream came true, and she is now an archivist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois has selected Associate Professors Halil Kilicoglu and Jodi Schneider for its new Emerging Research Leaders Academy. IHSI received over 50 nominations from department heads and directors associated with more than 35 units across campus. From those nominations, Kilicoglu and Schneider were among the fifteen participants chosen for the inaugural cohort.

PhD student Courtney Richardson has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. The award, which consists of $1,000 and a certificate, is given annually to a graduate student who is working on a dissertation on the philosophy of information, broadly construed.

Seventeen iSchool master's students have been named 2023-2024 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Since 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has promoted diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.