Associate Professor Carol Tilley will be the keynote speaker at the Marantz Picturebook Research Symposium, "Comics and the Graphic Narrative: The Future of the Movement," which will be held August 5-6 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie was the keynote speaker for The Future of the Scholarly Book conference, which was held July 31 at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The event, sponsored by Springer Nature and organized by the ANU Library, was designed to address challenges, issues, and trends in the modern scholarly monograph, particularly in social sciences and humanities.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Kyungwon Koh will join the faculty in August 2018. She is currently an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Koh's areas of expertise include digital youth, the maker movement, learning and community engagement through libraries, human information behavior, and competencies for information professionals. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will be a panelist at the Hampton University Forum on Minority Recruitment & Retention in the Library & Information Science Field, which will be held August 1-2 in Hampton, Virginia. The mission of the forum, which is supported by an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, is to identify critical issues in the recruitment and retention of minority librarians and serve as a springboard for ideas to effectively address these concerns. 

Over thirty Chinese academic librarians have a better understanding of American libraries after participating in a visit to the Urbana campus. The visit was hosted by Lian Ruan (MS '90, PhD '11), head librarian and director of international programs at the Illinois Fire Service Institute

Assistant Professor Peter Darch will discuss problems with reproducibility in research at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2018 Conference, which will be held July 25-28 at Lancaster University in the UK. EASST brings together a variety of disciplines, with many members having qualifications in both natural science/engineering and social sciences. The theme of this year's conference is "Meetings – Making Science, Technology, and Society Together."

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present her research on storytelling at two upcoming conferences, the Midwest Association of Colleges and Employers (ACE) Annual Conference, which will be held July 23-25 in Rosemont, Illinois, and the National Storytelling Summit, which will be held July 25-28 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Every year, more than one in three individuals aged 65 and older will experience a fall. Falls are the most common cause of injury in older adults, and can create ongoing health problems. But treatment and awareness of falling usually happens after a fall has already occurred.

Members of the Diesner research group will present a paper and posters at the 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held July 13-15 at Northwestern University. Assistant Professor Jana Diesner is a program committee co-chair for the conference.

Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been named a 2018-2019 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."