Associate Professor Carol Tilley has been selected as a judge for the 2020 Ringo Awards for achievement in comic books. Tilley is part of a five-member esteemed jury representing a cross-section of the comic book industry, which includes educators, publishers, press, and creators across numerous genres. Among her fellow jury members is Gene Luen Yang, a recent MacArthur Fellow and the Library of Congress' fifth National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Unlike other professional industry awards, the Mike Wieringo (Ringo) Comic Book Industry Awards include fan participation in the nomination process.

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a $389,810 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify false information about the HPV vaccine and model its impact on risk perceptions.

Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes has organized and will be leading virtual versions of the Python Trainers Summit on April 23 and Python Education Summit on April 24.

With schools resorting to virtual instruction during the pandemic, educators and families rely on online resources such as the National Park Service's Island of the Blue Dolphins website, which was developed by Sara L. Schwebel, iSchool professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, in partnership with the NPS. In this Q&A, Schwebel discusses how her research on the Island of the Blue Dolphins book led to her work with the NPS and future plans for the Books to Parks initiative.

Dawei Zhou and Yao Zhou, PhD students in computer science, will present the work of iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, at The Web Conference 2020. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 20-24, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

iSchool-affiliated partners on this project include Lisa Bievenue, director of informatics programs for Illinois Informatics Institute (campus leadership team member and campus/community distributed fabrication lead); Jeff Ginger (PhD '15), iSchool adjunct lecturer and Illinois Informatics Institute program coordinator for campus and community outreach (project design team member; design lead and fabrication contributor/coordinator); Amanda Elzbieciak (MS '17), CUC Fab Lab information manager (PPE fabrication); and Kristin Walters, MS/LIS student and CUC Fab Lab communications team member (social media assistance). More information is available on the CUC Fab Lab: Covid-19 Response web page, including videos about the fabrication process for face shields and the face shield build.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has received funding from the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Small Grant program at the University of Illinois to help community organizations tell more effective data stories.

The goal of the "Data Storytelling for Community Organizations" project is to develop and pilot a toolkit, based on the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST), to bring storytelling in information science to community organizations. The project will create a data storytelling kit for community organizations, position public libraries to distribute this toolkit, and support community organizations using the toolkit.

Two professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
This year’s fellows are David Sepkoski, a professor of history and iSchool affiliate professor, and Janice N. Harrington, a poet and professor of English.