The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jiaqi Ma will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Ma is a PhD candidate in School of Information at the University of Michigan (UMSI). He earned his bachelor's degree in automation from Tsinghua University. For the 2022-2023 academic year, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Kalie Maulding joined the iSchool on July 5 as a human resources specialist. In her new position, she will assist with all human resources functions at the School.

The Illinois Summer Research Symposium, which will be held on July 21-22 at the I-Hotel and Conference Center, will feature the research of iSchool students. Sponsored by the Graduate College, this symposium showcases equity and diversity programs at the University of Illinois and the exceptional research talents of the next generation of scholars. This year's conference is the culmination of two longstanding Graduate College programs, the Summer Predoctoral Institute (SPI) and Summer Research Opportunities Program for Undergraduates (SROP), and nine partner programs. 

This summer, MS/LIS student Loida Pan is serving as an intern with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) National Center for Data Services (NCDS). She is one of eight students who were selected to participate in the competitive internship program, which launched in 2022. During her work on the NNLM Evaluation Center (NEC) Data Warehouse project, she will be learning how to build and use relational databases, hone her programming language skills, and retrieve data from application programming interfaces. 

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the iSchool at Illinois, is pleased to announce its newest degree offering, the Bachelor of Science in Information Sciences + Data Science (BS/IS+DS).

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. 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.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Ziwei Wu and Associate Professor Jingrui He received the distinguished paper award during the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The interdisciplinary conference, which was held on June 21-24 in Seoul, South Korea, brings together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities.

A research paper co-authored by Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh; Xun Ge, professor of learning sciences at the University of Oklahoma; and iSchool doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella has received a 2022 American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Research Grant by the Educators of School Librarians Section of AASL. Sponsored by ABC-CLIO, these grants recognize "excellence in manuscripts addressing a persistent and recurring challenge in the field of school librarianship." The awarded paper, "Librarian-Teacher Co-Teaching and the Role of School Librarians in Facilitating Inquiry and Maker Learning," was recently published in School Library Research. Recipients will present their papers in October at the 2023 AASL National Conference in Tampa, Florida.

Tamela Chambers (MS/LIS '05) serves as the branch manager of the Chicago Public Library's Beverly Branch. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Demco Black Caucus American Library Association (BCALA) Excellence in Librarianship Award, which recognizes librarians who have made significant contributions to the promotion of African Americans in the library profession. "I'm deeply honored to be a recipient of an award that so many others that I admire have received," said Chambers. "It is great to have my work acknowledged but is also a reflection of all who took the time to mentor/coach and instruct me on my path to librarianship."

iSchool alumni Jean Wilkins (MS/LIS '85) and Patricia Boze (MS/LIS '88) have been named Illinois Library Luminaries by the Illinois Library Association (ILA). This distinction honors individuals who have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries.