Beth Lewis joined the iSchool on January 5 as an office administrator. In her new role, she will provide administrative support for research services, student affairs, and enrollment management.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), cohosted by the iSchool at Illinois and the Luddy School of Informatics at Indiana University, has received a $325,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of 15 awarded nationwide, this grant will support the development of a new set of visualizations, analytical tools, and infrastructure to enable users to interact more directly with the rich data extracted from the HathiTrust Digital Library’s collection of more than 17.5 million digitized volumes.

A new minor offered by Informatics Programs will foster critical skills in academic game studies and technical skills in game design. Open to undergraduates from all colleges and majors, the Game Studies and Design Minor will serve students who are interested in the study and design of games and the digital, extended, and virtual reality (XR/VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies involved with the crafting of interactive systems and interfaces relevant to game, film, education, and media industries, as well as other emerging professions.

Associate Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $149,921 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the performance of deep learning models. For her project, "Weakly Supervised Graph Neural Networks," she will focus on the lack of labeled data in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a deep learning method designed to perform inference on data described by graphs.

Academic Advisor Katelyn Talbott has assumed the position of chair of the Advising Graduate and Professional Students Community, which is part of NACADA, a global community for academic advising. Her two-year term began in December 2021. In her previous role as a member of the community's steering committee, Talbott served as a panelist at the 2020 NACADA Annual Conference, participated in the quarterly Graduate Professional Series Talks as a panelist and co-moderator, and participated in the 2021 NACADA Annual Conference as a lead presenter on program assessment methods.

MS/IM student Aradhya Seth is enjoying his time at the U of I, exploring campus, attending Trivia Tuesdays and karaoke at the Illini Union, and doing stand-up comedy. As an iSchool Ambassador, he gets the opportunity to share his experiences of student life at the iSchool and Illinois with prospective students.

Like the character in his latest book, Mr. Watson's Chickens, Jarrett Dapier (MS/LIS '15) has three chickens. Dapier, a librarian-turned-author, writes at his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he lives with his wife, two children, and pets (including a dog and two cats as well as the chickens). Mr. Watson's Chickens, illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was chosen by NPR and BookPage as one of the best books of 2021.

Cora Thomassen passed away on December 23, 2021. Thomassen earned her MS/LIS degree from the University of Illinois in 1955. She became the librarian at South Haven, Michigan, public schools, and then librarian to an extension of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In 1961, she accepted an assistant professor of library science position at the U of I, becoming a tenured associate professor in 1969.

Mary Schiavone joined the iSchool on November 29 as an office support specialist. She serves as the primary receptionist on the fourth floor at 614 E. Daniel Street and provides administrative support to the Undergraduate Affairs Office.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, will present papers at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2021), which will be held virtually from December 15-18.