As a Research Experience for Master's Students (REMS) Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information last summer, MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell worked with Oliver Haimson, assistant professor at Michigan, on a research project about trans technology design. One of the papers that resulted from their research, "Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions," has been accepted for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). Additional coauthors and research team members include Michigan graduate students Denny Starks and Zu Weinger.

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.

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, senior lecturer at the Australian National University, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for a two-year term through 2021. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. Each will give at least one lecture during their appointment.

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.

The staff at The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (BCCB) has announced the 2019 Blue Ribbons, their choices for the best of children's and young adult literature for the year. Blue Ribbons are chosen annually by BCCB reviewers and represent what they believe to be outstanding examples of fiction, nonfiction, and picture books for youth.

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.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has coauthored a chapter in the book Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design, which is being published by Routledge this month. Edited by Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe, the book demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism, and education.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited talk at the conference on “Meta-research for transforming clinical research,” which will be held on November 25 at the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris. The conference, organized by the EU-funded Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) consortium, will bring together experts on meta-research from the U.S. and Europe. MiRoR is an interdisciplinary, joint doctoral training program for future generations of scientists working at the intersection of meta-research and medicine.