The iSchool is pleased to announce that Travis L. Wagner will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023. They currently serve as a lecturer in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.
Lauren Ochs joined the iSchool in July as school librarian licensure coordinator. Her new duties include advising students about coursework and field experiences leading to school library licensure and/or endorsement; placing, supervising, and evaluating students in schools around the state in field experiences, such as practicum and student teaching; and aligning the school librarian licensure program with state and national standards.
Leep (MSLIS online) students Amanda Helm and Kaitlyn Weger have been selected to receive scholarships from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). The scholarship provides financial assistance to current employees of CARLI Governing Member Libraries who are pursuing a master's degree in library and information science (MSLIS) at the University of Illinois. CARLI provides library services and support to 128 Illinois public universities, community colleges, private colleges and universities, and special libraries.
PhD student Zachary (Zak) Kilhoffer sums up his research interests in two words: tech policy. He joined the iSchool in 2021 after working overseas as a labor economist.
PhD student Smit Desai received the Gary Mardsen Travel Award to present his research at the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2023, which was held on July 19-21 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The award, worth $2,500, supported Desai’s travel expenses.
Ethan Henderson (MSLIS ’07) is more than a staff member at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. The funds that he raises as the foundation's senior director of advancement benefit him personally, as someone with Parkinson's disease.
According to Chandra Prabha (PhD '84), in traditional Indian culture, a student offers a gift in gratitude to the teacher who has played an important role in his or her life. This practice, called "Guru-Dhakshina," inspired Prabha to make an estate gift to the University of Illinois in honor of the professors who most influenced her PhD studies—F. W. "Wilf" Lancaster and Linda C. Smith. Her gift will be split between the Wilf Lancaster Scholarship and the Linda C. Smith Doctoral Student Endowment Fund in the School of Information Sciences.
Weslee Walton joined the iSchool in June as associate director of finance and business operations. In his new role, he will oversee the School's financial operations and guide associate and assistant deans and directors in the development of their budgets by providing specialized analysis and reports.
A paper coauthored by PhD student Sullam Jeoung, Associate Professor Jana Diesner, and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu was named Best Long Paper at TrustNLP: Third Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing, which was held in conjunction with the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
