Jade Roberts, of Woodridge, Illinois, was awarded the inaugural Fulbright-Aalto University Graduate Award to complete a master's degree at Aalto University in Finland. Roberts earned a bachelor's degree in May from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with a major in individual plans of study and a minor in informatics. She focused her self-designed major at the intersection of artificial intelligence and linguistics, conducting research on auditory and cognitive neuroscience. At Aalto, Roberts plans to explore the root of biased technology and artificial intelligence algorithms through a master's degree in acoustics and audio technology.

A team including Associate Professor Jana Diesner has received a $1 million, three-year grant from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany) for their project, "TextTransfer: Assessing Impact Patterns in Research Texts Applying Corpus Driven Methods." The collaborative project is a continuation of the previously funded "Text Transfer" pilot project, in which Diesner and colleagues used a mixed methods approach to build taxonomies and prediction models for secondary practical uses of research findings from final reports of grant-funded work. Their methods included interviews, information extraction, natural language processing, and machine learning.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Sarah Park Dahlen (MS/LIS '09, PhD '09) will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. A nationally recognized scholar in children's literature, Dahlen is currently an associate professor of library and information science at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

According to Honore Bray (MS/LIS ’05), being director of the Missoula Public Library is "the best job ever." While this, of course, is debatable, Bray certainly has one of the best locations to do her job—a beautiful new library building in Missoula, Montana. The project took six years from start to finish, with Bray serving as part of the planning process, co-project manager, and liaison between the library’s trustees and the architects and construction team.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem and Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, participated in the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) annual conference, which was held virtually on June 10-12. This year's conference explored the idea of the arcade, broadly understood, in children's and young adult literature, media, and culture.

Karin Readel, senior education coordinator for Informatics programs, has received the Outstanding Advising Professional Award from IlliAAC, a professional development organization for student and academic affairs staff at the University of Illinois. She was recognized at the IlliAAC Conference on May 19.

Health care workers often don't adopt new guidelines for best practices in medical care until well after those guidelines are established. A team of researchers led by Eunice E. Santos, the dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has developed a new computational modeling and simulation framework to analyze decision-making and identify effective dissemination strategies for medical guidelines.

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is very pleased to announce that Colin Rhinesmith (PhD '14), associate professor at Simmons University School of Library and Information Science is the 2021 recipient of the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. The award's purpose is to recognize the unique teaching contribution of an individual as a teacher of information science.

With the recent publication of three studies on early-twentieth century Carnegie public library design, Professor Emeritus Alistair Black has completed his work for Cardiff University's Shelf-Life project. Directed by Professor Oriel Prizeman at the University's Welsh School of Architecture and funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council, Shelf-Life asks if the procurement of over 2,600 public library buildings across Britain and America a century ago, through the philanthropy of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, could benefit from “systematic thinking regarding their revitalization” in light of today’s climate change and need for sustainability and recycling in construction.

Two iSchool alumni are included in Library Journal's 2021 class of Movers & Shakers, an annual list that recognizes 46 professionals who are moving the library field forward as a profession. Carmi Parker (MS/LIS '15) was honored in the Advocates category, and Claudia Șerbănuță (MS/LIS '09, PhD '17) was honored in the Change Agents category.