An interest in medical informatics led Henry A. Gabb to pursue a doctoral degree in LIS. Gabb's research goal is to mine the vast scientific literature and genetic databases for biomarkers that predict drug efficacy.

Doctoral candidate Ana Lucic successfully defended her dissertation, "Automatically Identifying Facet Roles from Comparative Structures to Support Biomedical Text Summarization," on November 17.

Three iSchool students will participate in the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Forum, which will be held November 17-20 in Fort Worth, Texas. The LITA Forum is the annual conference for professionals in archives, libraries, and other information services.

Doctoral candidates Ana Lucic and Henry A. Gabb will present work with Associate Professor Catherine Blake at the 40th annual American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium held from November 12-16 in Chicago.

In the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish authored a work of utopian fiction that has been called one of the earliest examples of science fiction. Doctoral student Stacy Wykle thinks otherwise—and her research supports the book’s contributions to scientific discourse as well as Cavendish’s vision to reorganize the social, intellectual, and chronological realities of her day.

As an undergrad Christopher Murphy first heard about the iSchool at Illinois from a librarian friend at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Now as an MS/LIS student, intellectual property researcher for John Deere, and volunteer in the community, Murphy has seen for himself how important building a professional network can be.

When iSchool master’s student Alison Rollins saw that Nerinx Hall High School had a job opening for a librarian, she jumped at the chance to work for her alma mater. She was hired in in August, bringing several years of experience in youth services for public libraries.

Doctoral candidate Brittany Smith successfully defended her dissertation, "Motivation and Skill Acquisition in an Online Amateur Multimedia Community: A Case Study," on October 10.

Several University of Illinois iSchool faculty and students will participate in the 2016 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held October 14-18 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Doctoral student Paige Cunningham will participate this week in the conference, Learning with MOOCs III: Being and Learning in a Digital Age, to be held October 6-7 at the University of Pennsylvania.