Three iSchool faculty are named on four National Leadership Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): Professor Jiangping Chen; Sara Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children's Books (CCB); and Assistant Professor Kahyun Choi.

Dong Wang, professor and associate dean for research, has received a grant supporting his work in the areas of social sensing and intelligence and human-centered AI. 

A research team including professors Jingrui He of the School of Information Sciences and Hanghang Tong of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has received a Phase II award through the US Department of Energy's Genesis Mission to develop a model for electric grid expansion.

Associate Professor Rachel Adler and Teaching Assistant Professor Yildiz Esener serve as key research personnel on a project to develop better digital tools for older cancer survivors who are also facing physical, mental, and visual impairments.

As artificial intelligence becomes central to scientific discovery, researchers face a growing but often overlooked risk: the AI models, datasets, and automated systems they depend on can be compromised in ways that conventional cybersecurity tools are not designed to detect.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang has been invited to join the 2026 Computing Research Association (CRA) Emerging Leaders Cohort. The inaugural cohort will be introduced at the 2026 CRA Summit, which will be held from July 21-23 in Prior Lake, Minnesota. The summit is an exclusive, invitation-only gathering of senior leaders from academia, industry, and government who are shaping the future of computing research.

Informatics PhD student Robbie Sieczkowski's project, "The mv lab spatial trainer," is a mixed-reality app designed to help users learn and practice foundational concepts in Laban-Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LBMA).

Associate Professor Colin Rhinesmith has authored a new book examining how community coalitions address digital inequality and strengthen democracy.

PhD student Wei Cao and Assistant Professor Yaoyao Liu received a Best Paper Award at the 4th Workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision, which was held during the 2026 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 

A paper from Professor Dong Wang's Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab received the Best Dataset Paper Award at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) held in May 2026 in Los Angeles, California. According to Wang, the paper was accepted in the first review round, which had an acceptance rate of 4.7 percent (14 of 298 submissions).