The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jiaqi Ma will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Ma is a PhD candidate in School of Information at the University of Michigan (UMSI). He earned his bachelor's degree in automation from Tsinghua University. For the 2022-2023 academic year, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

The Illinois Summer Research Symposium, which will be held on July 21-22 at the I-Hotel and Conference Center, will feature the research of iSchool students. Sponsored by the Graduate College, this symposium showcases equity and diversity programs at the University of Illinois and the exceptional research talents of the next generation of scholars. This year's conference is the culmination of two longstanding Graduate College programs, the Summer Predoctoral Institute (SPI) and Summer Research Opportunities Program for Undergraduates (SROP), and nine partner programs. 

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Ziwei Wu and Associate Professor Jingrui He received the distinguished paper award during the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The interdisciplinary conference, which was held on June 21-24 in Seoul, South Korea, brings together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities.

A research paper co-authored by Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh; Xun Ge, professor of learning sciences at the University of Oklahoma; and iSchool doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella has received a 2022 American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Research Grant by the Educators of School Librarians Section of AASL. Sponsored by ABC-CLIO, these grants recognize "excellence in manuscripts addressing a persistent and recurring challenge in the field of school librarianship." The awarded paper, "Librarian-Teacher Co-Teaching and the Role of School Librarians in Facilitating Inquiry and Maker Learning," was recently published in School Library Research. Recipients will present their papers in October at the 2023 AASL National Conference in Tampa, Florida.

A new guide to children's literature includes a chapter on censorship by Emily Knox, associate professor and director of graduate programs. A Companion to Children's Literature, co-edited by Deborah Stevenson, former director of the iSchool's Center for Children's Books and former editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, was recently published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Professor Catherine Blake is one of ten faculty members from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus who have been selected by the Carle Illinois College of Medicine as Health Innovation Professors (HIP). The new HIP faculty will collaborate with Carle Illinois students, physicians, and other health care providers to pursue new frontiers in health-related research and innovation, creating new opportunities for funding from government agencies, industry, and foundations. The new faculty members will also pioneer advancements in medical education and the integration of health-related concepts into undergraduate and graduate courses across the UIUC campus.

iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Meicen Sun will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Sun is a PhD candidate in political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a research affiliate with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University.

The old, green hand press that used to be stationed on the first floor of the iSchool building is getting a new lease on life. It has been moved to the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, where students and community members will be using it for letterpress printing. The Washington-style hand press, which was manufactured in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by Reliance, was used for teaching and fine printing at the University of Illinois for decades before becoming a show piece at the iSchool.