The Illinois Summer Research Symposium, which will be held on July 21-22 at the I-Hotel and Conference Center, will feature the research of iSchool students. Sponsored by the Graduate College, this symposium showcases equity and diversity programs at the University of Illinois and the exceptional research talents of the next generation of scholars. This year's conference is the culmination of two longstanding Graduate College programs, the Summer Predoctoral Institute (SPI) and Summer Research Opportunities Program for Undergraduates (SROP), and nine partner programs. 

This summer, MS/LIS student Loida Pan is serving as an intern with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) National Center for Data Services (NCDS). She is one of eight students who were selected to participate in the competitive internship program, which launched in 2022. During her work on the NNLM Evaluation Center (NEC) Data Warehouse project, she will be learning how to build and use relational databases, hone her programming language skills, and retrieve data from application programming interfaces. 

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Ziwei Wu and Associate Professor Jingrui He received the distinguished paper award during the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The interdisciplinary conference, which was held on June 21-24 in Seoul, South Korea, brings together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities.

A research paper co-authored by Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh; Xun Ge, professor of learning sciences at the University of Oklahoma; and iSchool doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella has received a 2022 American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Research Grant by the Educators of School Librarians Section of AASL. Sponsored by ABC-CLIO, these grants recognize "excellence in manuscripts addressing a persistent and recurring challenge in the field of school librarianship." The awarded paper, "Librarian-Teacher Co-Teaching and the Role of School Librarians in Facilitating Inquiry and Maker Learning," was recently published in School Library Research. Recipients will present their papers in October at the 2023 AASL National Conference in Tampa, Florida.

Doctoral candidate Qiuyan Guo has received a 2022 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu, the international library and information studies honor society. Beta Phi Mu awarded six fellowships, valued at $3,000 each, to doctoral students who are working on their dissertations in LIS, information studies, informatics, or a related field. Guo received the fellowship for her dissertation, "Exploring Chinese Celebrity Fans' Online Information Behaviors and Understandings of Their Fandom."

iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

PhD student Yuanxi Fu received scholarships for two summer institutes in cybersecurity, network analysis, and computational social science. The summer institutes, which took place in June, were hybrid events hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.

PhD student Julia Burns Petrella has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)/University of Washington Information School Youth Services Graduate Student Travel Award, which will support her participation in the ALISE Annual Conference.

Doctoral candidate Jessica Cheng successfully defended her dissertation, "Agreeing to Disagree: Applying a Logic-based Approach to Reconciling and Merging Multiple Taxonomies," on May 25.