As baseball teams gear up for spring training this month, Jack Bales (MS '74) will begin another season of following—and researching—the Chicago Cubs, a team whose history he knows well. Bales, a reference and humanities librarian, combined his expert research skills and interest in the Cubs to author a book on the team's early history. His book, Before They Were Cubs: The Early Years of Chicago's First Professional Team, was published last spring by McFarland & Company.

PhD student Natã Barbosa worked as an intern at Airbnb in summer 2019. The internship provided the basis for his paper, "Designing for Trust: A Behavioral Framework for Sharing Economy Platforms," which was selected for The Web Conference 2020. Barbosa was recently named a 2020 Facebook Fellowship finalist.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present the webcast, "Community Efforts Advancing Reproducibility and Transparency in Data- and Computationally-Enabled Research," on February 7. Her talk is part of a nine-week series of webcasts hosted by Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research), in which leaders in research transparency discuss their latest thinking on how to make statistical research open, reproducible, and credible. Registration for the webcast, which will take place at 12:00 p.m., is free but required to access the live stream.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

As a Research Experience for Master's Students (REMS) Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information last summer, MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell worked with Oliver Haimson, assistant professor at Michigan, on a research project about trans technology design. One of the papers that resulted from their research, "Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions," has been accepted for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). Additional coauthors and research team members include Michigan graduate students Denny Starks and Zu Weinger.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

This Is MY Fort! and What Is Inside THIS Box?, written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Olivier Tallec, and published by Scholastic Press, are the winners of the 2020 Gryphon Award for Children's Literature.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

Whitney McComas joined the iSchool on January 8 as an instructional technology support specialist. She comes to the School from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where she worked as the Moodle service manager and an educational technology specialist for Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts and Sciences (ATLAS). 

The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."