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.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 26th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2020), which will be held virtually August 22-27. The conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research, and experiences.

Academic Advisor Katelyn Talbott has been named Outstanding New Advising Professional by IlliAAC, a professional development organization for student and academic affairs staff at the University of Illinois. The award recognizes outstanding academic advising by a University of Illinois employee and IlliAAC member with less than three years of experience. Talbott, who primarily advises MS/LIS students, joined the iSchool in January 2019.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Professor Michael Twidale will serve as interim PhD program director for one year beginning August 16. He will take over from Associate Professor Jana Diesner, who recently concluded her three-year term of service as PhD program director.

A record fifteen iSchool master’s students were named 2020-2021 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MS/LIS student Anthony Martínez holds a BS in business administration and marketing from Idaho State University.

Doctoral candidate Kirstin Phelps successfully defended her dissertation, "Collective Leadership for Community Action: A Case-Based Inquiry into Supporting Digital Literacy Initiatives," on August 14.

Sherry Williams (MS '19) has a personal connection to her work as president and founder of the Bronzeville Historical Society. The Bronzeville neighborhood, located on Chicago’s South Side, was known as the "Black Metropolis" during its heyday in the early twentieth century. The Great Migration brought many African Americans to Bronzeville, including Williams’ grandmother, who moved to the area from the Delta of Mississippi in 1942.