The iSchool is pleased to announce that Karen Wickett (MS '07, PhD '12) will join the faculty in August 2018. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the 10th Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in in Libraries International Conference (QQML 2018), which will be held on May 22-25 in Chania, Greece.

Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will give a presentation at the Carle Cancer Center in Urbana on May 18. She will give the talk, "Learning Health Systems that Leverage Informatics and Communities of Practice."

During the 2018 Python Education Summit, held in conjunction with the PyCon 2018 conference, Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes will discuss how to help new Python learners be successful. PyCon, an annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language, will be held May 9-17 in Cleveland.

The iSchool is proud to announce the promotion of three faculty to associate professor with indefinite tenure: Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke, Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner, and Assistant Professor Emily Knox. Their new appointments will be effective August 16, 2018, pending final approval by the Board of Trustees.

The first iSchool Corporate Showcase took place on April 24 at the University of Illinois Research Park. The event, which included a poster session and presentations, introduced employers to the strengths and expertise of information science professionals and celebrated the iSchool’s inaugural class of MS in information management (MS/IM) students. It attracted more than one hundred participants, including corporate partners and iSchool alumni, faculty, staff, and students. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will give the keynote address at the Northeast Ohio Regional Library System's Critical Conversations Mini-conference, Tolerance is Not Enough: Libraries Respond to Hate, which will be held on May 3 in Twinsburg, Ohio. The interactive event will focus on helping library staff assess their own cultural identities and biases and on looking at how these biases impact service.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will present his recent work with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) on April 30 at Harvard Library. Downie is codirector of HTRC, a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to text found in the HathiTrust (HT) Digital Library.

Sharon Irish, project coordinator for the iSchool's Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), has received a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her upcoming book highlighting artist Stephen Willats. According to Irish, Willats' ideas about the need for repeated contact with each other to discover different perspectives are fundamental to education and information sharing.

iSchool faculty and alumni played an active role in the Playful by Design Spring Symposium, which took place April 5-7 on the Urbana campus. The symposium, organized by the Playful by Design Research Cluster, included presentations and panel discussions as well as a new exhibit at the Spurlock Museum, movie screening, keynote address, and games and gaming make-a-thon. The event was sponsored by the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning, Spurlock Museum, CU Community FabLab, and Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.