Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2024-2025 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

A project led by the Game Studies and Design (GSD) program in Informatics has been selected to receive the Illinois Global Institute New Approaches to International Area and Global Studies grant. The project, "Extending Capacities of Area and Global Studies to Shape the Future of Emerging Technologies," is the inaugural recipient of the two-year, $30,000 award.

The iSchool is proud to announce the following appointments: Emily Knox and Yang Wang have been promoted to professor; Elizabeth Hoiem has been promoted to associate professor with indefinite tenure; Associate Professor Maria Bonn has been granted indefinite tenure; Judith Pintar has been promoted to teaching professor; and Martin Wolske has been promoted to teaching associate professor. Their new appointments became effective August 16, 2024.

Associate Professor Rachel Adler, Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, and Assistant Professor Meicen Sun are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois has selected Associate Professor Yun Huang for the 2024-25 Emerging Research Leaders Academy (ERLA). Designed for mid-career faculty to achieve research success, the program provides vital leadership and team science training to pursue large, multi-PI grants, lead campus research initiatives, enhance their own research programs, and ultimately position Illinois for research excellence. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been awarded a $578,677 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-256709-OLS-24), 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."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Kyungwon Koh, associate professor and director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab, has been awarded a $149,995 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-256680-OLS-24). The award is part of the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, which supports "projects that address critical needs of the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance practice in these professions to strengthen library and archival services for the American public."

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.