Professor Emerita Pauline Anna Blazina Atherton Cochrane passed away on July 29, 2024, at The Arthur Home, in Arthur, Illinois. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo a four-year, $459,000 grant to create inclusive learning environments and advance workplace equity for persons with disabilities in STEM fields. The project will build on Seo's work in developing open-source tools that can augment visual charts into touchable (braille), readable (text), and audible (sound) representations.

Jiangping Chen assumed the position of interim executive associate dean and visiting professor on August 16. In this role, she will work closely with Dean Eunice E. Santos to realize the iSchool's strategic goals and objectives. She also will provide leadership for the internal administration of the School, including oversight for the work of associate deans and assigned staff as well as the coordination of faculty affairs. Chen's position will become permanent following approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

In his role as a computer vision engineer at Precision Planting, Jeremy Carnahan (MSIM '21) is part of a team that is making agriculture more productive and sustainable while reducing costs for growers. 

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2024-2025 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

A project led by the Game Studies and Design (GSD) program in Informatics has been selected to receive the Illinois Global Institute New Approaches to International Area and Global Studies grant. The project, "Extending Capacities of Area and Global Studies to Shape the Future of Emerging Technologies," is the inaugural recipient of the two-year, $30,000 award.

Doctoral candidate Si Chen successfully defended her dissertation, "Designing Ethical Emotion AI-based Learning Experience among Ability-Diverse Users," on July 30.

Amira Al-Mutairi joined the iSchool last month as an academic advisor and coordinator of graduate affairs. In this position, she will provide academic advising and support for students in the MS in Information Management and MS in Bioinformatics programs. She will also be responsible for teaching Internship (IS 569).

The iSchool is proud to announce the following appointments: Emily Knox and Yang Wang have been promoted to professor; Elizabeth Hoiem has been promoted to associate professor with indefinite tenure; Associate Professor Maria Bonn has been granted indefinite tenure; Judith Pintar has been promoted to teaching professor; and Martin Wolske has been promoted to teaching associate professor. Their new appointments became effective August 16, 2024.

Associate Professor Rachel Adler, Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, and Assistant Professor Meicen Sun are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.