Teaching Associate Professor and Acting BS/IS Program Director Judith Pintar has been selected by the Office of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs as the University of Illinois Distinguished Teacher-Scholar for the 2020-2021 academic year. The program offers faculty members an opportunity to engage in an in-depth analysis of the craft and art of teaching, consider new approaches, and put their insights to work in ways that will benefit their students and the campus community. Pintar will receive $7,500 for her project and an additional $7,500 for a research assistant.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Madelyn Sanfilippo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral IT policy researcher at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University.

Adjunct Lecturer Melissa Wong and Laura Saunders, associate professor of library and information science at Simmons University, have co-edited a new book, Reference and Information Services, 6th edition, which was recently published by ABC-CLIO. The first half of the book establishes a foundation of knowledge on reference service and frames each topic with ethical and social justice perspectives, while the second half introduces tools and resources used by reference professionals.

iSchool Associate Professor Masooda Bashir and Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma have published a paper, "Use of Apps in the COVID-19 Response and the Loss of Privacy Protection," in Nature Medicine. In the paper, they examine how digital surveillance used to contain the spread of COVID-19 may impact privacy rights.

iSchool PhD student Natã Barbosa and his advisor Associate Professor Yang Wang have received a $65,053 grant from Facebook for their project, "In-Situ Privacy Controls of Profiling and Ad-Targeting." The goal of the project is to design a privacy control framework that makes profiling and ad-targeting more transparent to ordinary Internet users.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner is a new associate editor on the editorial board of Science Advances, the open access multidisciplinary journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The journal supports the AAAS mission by extending the capacity of Science magazine to identify and promote significant advances in science and engineering across a wide range of areas. Science Advances editors not only have stellar reputations in their disciplines but also have acknowledged breadth in recognizing and promoting interdisciplinary collaborations. Diesner brings to this role her expertise in computational social science, human-centered data science, network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and responsible computing.

Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre received an Honorable Mention in the category of Outstanding Faculty/Staff at the 8th annual Diversity and Social Justice Education Awards. The awards recognize undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and student organizations "that have sought to address marginalization, oppression, and/or privilege in their communities." La Barre serves as chair of the iSchool's Diversity Committee.

Note from interviewee Anita Say Chan: In the weeks since this interview, we’re all encountering a world that is by no means an unforeseen event or disaster attributable to the novel biology of the virus alone, but indeed, a symptom of an already-ailing system decades (or more) in the making. The breathtaking loss and destruction we now see didn't just happen far away, in some abstract "elsewhere," and it didn't happen overnight because of a virus. It advanced gradually, over time, with every mundane decision to ignore precarity either locally or globally, or to exacerbate vulnerability by disinvesting from civic infrastructures and public capacities (and normalizing such divestments), thus feeding what Nancy Fraser has called the "crisis of care" (h/t Lisa Nakamura) that devalues care work–even as the essential nature of nursing, among other disciplines, is made all the more apparent. We are, and have been, in need of a global reset; not as some version of salvation that someone else brings, but as a new terms of being that allows us to recognize the differential agencies we do lend, and have lent, to our own local and worldly contexts, and that we might now work in relationaly if new forms of worldly connection are to emerge.

Associate Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Maria Bonn and three iSchool alumni have received the 2020 Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing, which recognizes significant and timely contributions to library publishing theory and practice. Bonn’s coauthors include Katrina Fenlon (MS '09, PhD '17), assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park; Megan Senseney (MS '08), head of the Office of Digital Innovation and Stewardship at the University of Arizona Libraries; and Janet Swatscheno (MS '14), instructor and digital publishing librarian, University Library, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Community Data Clinic, a mixed methods data studies and interdisciplinary community research lab led by Associate Professor Anita Say Chan, is partnering with the Cunningham Township Supervisor's Office, one of the primary social services agencies in Champaign County, to help vulnerable populations and families in crisis. Their partnership will result in a research project to inform a new online version of the 211 directory that connects people, based on locality, to dozens of crisis response and social services, including housing, mental health services, and food support. Funded by the United Way of Champaign County and Champaign County Mental Health Board, with a call center run by PATH in Bloomington, Illinois, 211—a service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year—provides information and referrals to 44 counties in the state, all at no cost and with anonymity to users.