The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Renee Hendricks as a teaching assistant professor. She has served as an adjunct lecturer in the iSchool, teaching the Methods of Data Science (IS 517) course online.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 28th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2022), which will be held from August 14-18 in Washington, D.C. The conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research, and experiences.

Thirteen iSchool master's students have been named 2022-2023 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Since 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has promoted diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.

Smit Malik, a second-year student in the MS/IM program, discusses his summer internship with Zwift, Inc.

Katrina Hagler joined the iSchool on August 8 as director of recruitment and admissions. In this position, she will oversee recruiting and admissions for the School's degree programs.

A new study examines how Americans acquired food at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how those activities changed over time as case numbers fluctuated and vaccines became available.

Library makerspaces offer community members the opportunity to tinker, design, experiment, and create with a range of technology in an informal learning space. However, because current makerspaces and maker tools are highly vision oriented, blind and visually impaired (BVI) people have limited access to these learning opportunities. A new project led by Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo and Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, director of the CU Community Fab Lab, seeks to address this problem by creating accessible maker programs for BVI learners and developing training materials for librarians and maker professionals on accessible making. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $498,638 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-252360-OLS-22) for their project, "Promoting Computational Thinking Skills for Blind and Visually Impaired Teens Through Accessible Library Makerspaces."

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Adam Rusch as a teaching assistant professor. He was most recently employed as an eLearning specialist in the College of Education, where he helped the college shift to emergency remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic and become one of the first units on the Urbana campus to completely transition to the Canvas Learning Management System.

Penny Ames, admissions and records coordinator, is among the eight civil service employees from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have been named recipients of the 2022 Chancellor's Distinguished Staff Award. Each recipient of the Chancellor's Distinguished Staff Award receives $1,000 and a plaque. Recipients' names also are engraved on a plaque displayed in the Illinois Human Resources Office.

Assistant Professor Yun Huang has been awarded a three-year, $399,996 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-252329-OLS-22), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports innovative research by untenured, tenure-track faculty.