Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner gave a keynote talk and presented a paper at the 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which was held July 17-20 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yun Huang will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jessie Chin will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently a research assistant professor in biomedical and health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yang Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He is currently an assistant professor and co-director of the Social Computing Systems Lab (SALT) in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library, in collaboration with Kyle Jones, assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at the Indiana University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), has been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for Prioritizing Privacy: Training to Improve Practice in Library Analytics Projects.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox was recently appointed president of the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF), a nonprofit legal and educational organization affiliated with the American Library Association, and elected vice president/president-elect of Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies.

Associate Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Maria Bonn and colleagues in North Carolina and Kansas have received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (MS LG-36-19-0021-19) to fund their project, Scholarly Communications Notebook (SCN). Co-principal investigators on the project include Will Cross, director of the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center at North Carolina State University Libraries, and Josh Bolick, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Kansas Libraries.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan has been selected as a 2019-2020 Data & Society Faculty Fellow. Data & Society is a research institute focused on the social and cultural issues arising from automation and data-centric technology. Its programs draw together researchers and a broad network of practitioners to bring new perspectives and intellectual breadth to the institute's work.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem presented her research at the Children's Literature Association conference (ChLA 2019), which was held June 13-15 in Indianapolis. With the theme "Activism and Empathy," this year's conference

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Halil Kilicoglu will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He is currently a staff scientist at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH).