iSchool undergraduates Madisen LeShoure and Harshitha Vetrivel have been awarded Kathryn J. Oberdeck Social Justice Scholarships. The scholarship program, which is sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association at Illinois, awards $1,000 scholarships for undergraduate students who have demonstrated outstanding commitment to social justice in the community. 

Twelve iSchool master’s students have been named 2024-2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Since 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has promoted diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

Doctoral candidate Lanyu Shang successfully defended her dissertation, "A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Approach Towards Equality, Well-Being, and Responsibility in Sustainable Communities," on June 19.

Leep (MSLIS online) student Morgan Rondinelli shares her experience as a mentally ill library professional in the article, "What's Missing in Conversations about Libraries and Mental Illness," which was recently published in the open access, peer-reviewed journal In the Library with the Lead Pipe. 

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024), which will be held from June 16-21 in Mexico City, Mexico.

Zifan Zhao, who is pursuing dual degrees in information sciences + data science and psychology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience, has been selected as a 2024 Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellow. The program provides undergraduate students with a $3,000 award to pursue interdisciplinary research at the Beckman Institute during the summer.