Maria Bonn, associate professor and director of the MSLIS and CAS programs, has been elected president-elect of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). She will begin her one-year term immediately following the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, which will be held from October 25-29 in Calgary, Canada, and will assume the presidency in fall 2025.

Doctoral candidate Lanyu Shang successfully defended her dissertation, "A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Approach Towards Equality, Well-Being, and Responsibility in Sustainable Communities," on June 19.

Gillian Gabriel joined the iSchool on June 3 as an office administrator - course scheduler. In this position, she will work with the Academic Affairs team to design the schedule and input it into Banner, work with Catalog Management and Section Scheduling (CMSS) to arrange classroom space, manage the final exam schedule, and coordinate with the bookstore on textbook orders.

Leep (MSLIS online) student Morgan Rondinelli shares her experience as a mentally ill library professional in the article, "What's Missing in Conversations about Libraries and Mental Illness," which was recently published in the open access, peer-reviewed journal In the Library with the Lead Pipe. 

Adjunct Lecturer Kristen Mattson has authored a second edition of her book, Digital Citizenship in Action: Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities, which was recently released by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). In the new book, Mattson provides additional history and context to the digital citizenship conversation as well as opportunities to bring digital citizenship into the classroom.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024), which will be held from June 16-21 in Mexico City, Mexico.

Zifan Zhao, who is pursuing dual degrees in information sciences + data science and psychology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience, has been selected as a 2024 Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellow. The program provides undergraduate students with a $3,000 award to pursue interdisciplinary research at the Beckman Institute during the summer. 

PhD student Abhinav Choudhry has received a 2024-2026 Institute for Information Literacy at Purdue research award for his project, "Gamified Finance Simulator for Older Adults: A Financial Literacy and Vulnerability Intervention." The $4,000 award is intended for research that enables people to navigate and contribute to today's information environment. Associate Professor Rachel Adler and PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou will serve as co-principal investigators on the project, which aims to create a gamified simulation of digital banking. 

Alexis Miller joined the iSchool on June 4 as an office manager. In this position, she will provide support to the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and assist with various student affairs activities.

Hiromi Morikawa (CAS '12), executive officer and chief information officer at Nishimoto Co., Ltd., enjoys helping her teams grow and succeed. She was recently named a 2024 Consumer Goods Technology Visionary, which recognizes a select cohort of consumer goods executives who embody positive change in their organizations and inspire through their leadership.