Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem explains how studying children's literature offers new perspectives on history.

For a decade, the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) has been offering scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois in exchange for government service after graduation. The program is offered through the University's Information Trust Institute (ITI), an interdisciplinary research center addressing all aspects of information trust.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The Fiddler Fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.

Affiliate Professor Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science, been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, as a 2019 Distinguished Member.

Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Kaleidoscope academic conference, which was held on December 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. ITU is the United Nations' specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Brooks’ presentation was part of the WHO special panel on the digital transformation of the health sector.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Ellen Knutson (MS '02, PhD '08) was part of the U.S. delegation to the Dartmouth Conference: U.S.-Russia Citizen Dialogue in the 21st Century, which took place on December 3-5 in Dayton, Ohio. The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between citizens of Russia and the U.S. focused on the changing nature of the relationship between the two countries.