MS/IM student Pranay Parmar won first place in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 22 at the 2019 Scholarly Commons Open House.

Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."

For its defense of the First Amendment rights of incarcerated individuals, the Education Justice Project (EJP) has earned the 2019 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. EJP is a social justice and academic community of incarcerated students, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, family members of the incarcerated, and others. Based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EJP offers educational programs to eligible individuals incarcerated at Danville Correctional Center (DCC), a men’s medium-security state prison 35 miles from the Urbana campus.

Professor Allen Renear, School of Information Sciences, will join the Provost's leadership team as special advisor for strategic initiatives. Renear will be working closely with other University academic and research units to provide analysis, guidance, and leadership with the planning, coordination, and launch of selected strategic initiatives in the University's Strategic Plan, The Next 150. Priority will be given to activities and programs in support of the digital transformation initiative; graduate, professional, and continuing education at the intersection of disciplines; and, workforce-development strategies across the public and private sectors through the Discovery Partners Institute and the Illinois Innovation Network.

As a young professional working to advance her career, Leep student Erica Halpern appreciates the flexibility and convenience of the iSchool's online MS/LIS program. She also is grateful for the George Bonn Scholarship that she received from the School, which removed a "huge financial burden" and has allowed her to focus on her studies.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Associate Professor Victoria Stodden a two-year, $300,000 grant to facilitate research on scientific reproducibility. Her project, "Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science," seeks to improve understanding of how the scientific community can adapt to the increasing use of computing and large-scale data resources. Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by an NSF Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER).

Faculty, staff, and students represented the iSchool at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), held on October 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has received a $200,000 grant from the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) for her project, "Reliable Extraction of Emergency Response Networks from Text Data and Bench-marking with National Emergency Response Guidelines." CIRI is a Center of Excellence of the Department of Homeland Security that aims to enhance the resiliency of the nation's critical infrastructures.

A travel grant provided by the iSchool will allow MS/LIS student Morgan Sherlock to present her research with Laurel Post (MS '19) and Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94) at the Charleston Conference without the extra financial stress. In the paper they will be presenting, "Behind the Gate: Early Career Researchers' Motivations for Using ResearchGate," the coauthors examine the motivations behind why early career researchers use the academic social network site ResearchGate and how publishers and librarians can use these findings to better understand and support their user communities.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has appointed Dean Eunice E. Santos to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Board of Directors. Santos was named dean of the School of Information Sciences in August. She previously served as the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair and Professor, and department chair of computer science, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.