Affiliated faculty member Clara Chu is the recipient of the 2015 Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Distinguished Service Award. This award is given annually to a CALA member demonstrating outstanding leadership and achievement in library and information service at the national or international level. It is the association's highest honor.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF). Her one-year term will begin at the annual meeting of the board during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in June.

A recent article in Environmental Health Perspectives by Associate Professor Catherine Blake and doctoral student Henry A. Gabb explores chemical exposure from consumer products in order to identify chemical combinations that appear together frequently.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will speak twice this summer on topics at the intersection of comics and medicine.

Professor Les Gasser has been selected as a 2016-2017 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellow. NCSA's competitive fellowship program is designed to cultivate collaborations among faculty and researchers across the Urbana campus and with NCSA.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley has been elected second vice president of the Comics Studies Society (CSS) in the organization’s first election since its founding in 2014.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke is sharing her research on topics related to digital literacy, including pedagogical approaches to using social media in the classroom and identifying and confronting misleading information, with two conference presentations this month.

This week Associate Professor Victoria Stodden delivered the opening plenary address of the spring membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). The event was held April 4-5 in San Antonio, Texas.

The year’s best comics and graphic novels will be honored with Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards in July at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Carol Tilley, a University of Illinois associate professor of library and information science, is one of six judges selecting the comics that will appear on the awards ballot in more than two dozen categories.

As society ages and human knowledge progresses, we expect innovations from scientists that will improve quality of life for older adults and help society adapt to the realities of a changing population. Yet the scientific workforce itself is aging, potentially affecting its own capacity for innovation. The relationship between innovation in the scientific workforce and the increasing demand for innovation is complex, with far-reaching implications influencing everything from healthcare to the economy.