The Humanities Without Walls Consortium, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, fosters interdisciplinary, collaborative research, teaching, and scholarship in the humanities, sponsoring new areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. On December 14, the Consortium announced the results of its latest research challenge initiative, "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate." It awarded one of these grants—a multi-year investment of $138,360—to a team of humanists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The award will support their multi-year research project, titled "The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record." 

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider (MS ’08) has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a series of automated informatics tools for reviewing medical literature more quickly and easily. The project, “Text Mining Pipeline to Accelerate Systematic Reviews in Evidence-Based Medicine,” was funded through a subaward from the University of Illinois at Chicago that will cover $228,006 in direct costs.

iSchool Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes (MS '16) has been elected to the 2018 Executive Council for the Carpentries, the first joint steering committee for the merged organizations of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. The Carpentries is a volunteer community of instructors, more than one thousand worldwide, teaching scientists basic lab skills for research computing. 

Whether you're a cybersecurity student, researcher, or professional, you are likely to confront difficult ethical dilemmas that can have significant implications. Equipped with skills like malware knowledge and hacking techniques, those in the field of cybersecurity have inside knowledge that can be powerful and potentially dangerous. There is a growing need to tether this power to an awareness of the complex web of potential consequences, critical ethical reasoning skills, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of social responsibility to ensure this power is used for the greater good.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is one of six Illinois faculty members who have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for 2018. It is the third year in the last four that the Urbana campus has garnered more fellowship awards than any other single institution.

Associate Professor Catherine Blake has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2017-2018. The award is endowed by alumni and friends of the School and given in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in information sciences.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie was a keynote speaker for the 7th Rizal Library International Conference, which was held from November 16-18 at Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, Philippines. The theme of the conference was "CLICK! Connecting Libraries, Information, and Community Knowledge."

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke has been elected director for Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). As director, Cooke will serve on the ALISE executive board and act as the liaison to all of the special interest groups and committees.

Embedded in our society is a cultural memory of the old-time family doctor, a medical practitioner who knows of your family, your history, and your daily life, and uses that knowledge to provide the most optimal care. One Illinois faculty member and his research team have been working to move closer to that goal by exploiting a piece of familiar technology—the smartphone that can now be found in the average American's pocket.

Professor of Medical Information Science Bruce Schatz, an affiliated faculty member at the iSchool, and coauthors previously developed software for Android phones that uses the phone's native motion sensor to predict a lung patient’s disease state. 

Nicole A. Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director, has received a Provost's Initiative on Teaching Advancement (PITA) grant, worth $7,500, for her proposal, "Inspiring Culturally Responsive Pedagogy." PITA grants support the implementation of teaching innovations and enhancements at the University of Illinois.