Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS LG-246404-OLS-20) for her project, "Securing our Public Libraries: A Forum on Privacy and Security." The project seeks to identify the existence and absence of privacy protecting technologies (software and/or hardware) in public library systems.
Tamara Roosevelt, senior grants and contracts coordinator at the iSchool, has received the Outstanding Service Award from Sponsored Programs and Research Compliance (SPaRC), a working group at the University of Illinois devoted to the management and administration of sponsored programs. She was presented with the award at the SPaRC Retreat on September 4.
Senior Lecturer Sharon Comstock has been named to the first roster for the Public Library Data Alliance (PLDA) by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Representing an array of stakeholders, this group will continue the work of the COSLA's Measures that Matter initiative.
The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program awarded $20 million to the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for the new Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute. The program, a joint effort between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture was created in response to the White House's 2019 update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, which aims to provide support for AI research that focuses on impacting and improving society. iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He is one of the researchers involved in the AIFARMS Institute.
Forty-one iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2020. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.
Inkyung Choi and David Hopping have been promoted to the position of teaching assistant professor, effective August 16, 2020. Choi and Hopping joined the iSchool in August 2019 as a lecturer and visiting lecturer, respectively.
The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Jill Naiman as a teaching assistant professor. She has served as an adjunct lecturer at the School since 2018 and as a visiting scholar at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) since 2016.
MS/LIS student Jonathan Puckett has been selected as a recipient of the Sherrill Carlson Fellowship by The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation’s oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all academic disciplines. The fellowship, worth $35,000, is one of two national awards given by the society to the top-ranked nominee in the humanities and the arts.
The iSchool is pleased to announce that Zoe LeBlanc will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. She is currently a postdoctoral associate and the Weld Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.
Since COVID-19 began its menacing march across Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and then across the world, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has taken a "whatever works" strategy to ensure its replication and spread. But in a new study undergoing peer review, University of Illinois researchers and students show the virus is honing the tactics that may make it more successful and more stable.
