Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen has been selected as one of six jurors for the 2026 Kirkus Prize, given annually in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. The prize is one of the richest in the literary world, with awards of $50,000 in each category.

Assistant Professor Yaoyao Liu has been awarded a grant through the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program. NVIDIA, a world leader in accelerated computing and AI, established the program to advance academic research by providing world-class computing access and resources to researchers. Liu has received 32,000 A100 GPU-hours on Brev, an AI and machine learning platform that empowers developers to run, build, train, deploy, and scale AI models with GPU in the cloud. 

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois International are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 International Achievement Awards. The International Achievement Awards recognize outstanding alumni, faculty, and students whose exceptional work, service, and/or scholarship have made a significant, global impact.

CHICAGO – The American Library Association is set to confer an honorary lifetime membership upon former ALA President Barbara J. Ford. Recommended by the ALA Executive Board and elected by the ALA Council, honorary membership is the highest honor given by the Association and conferred upon a living person whose outstanding contributions have made a lasting impact on librarianship, libraries, and the communities they serve.

A new app developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang aims to make navigating conferences less work and more fun, so that attendees can meet others, discover fresh ideas, and "experience academic life as an exciting adventure." The app, PapersClaw.fun, will debut at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.

The iSchool welcomed five staff members to its undergraduate advising team this academic year. Academic Advisors and Coordinators Cory Castaneda, Dara (DL) Lawyer, and Keri Marion joined the School in August, and Katie Murphy joined in February. Stacy Clemmons was promoted to senior advisor and coordinator and transitioned from graduate to undergraduate student advising. 

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as a Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Beckman Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year. CAS is one of the most prestigious faculty recognition programs at the University of Illinois. Its primary mission is to identify and support the most productive and innovative faculty across all disciplines. CAS Fellows are nominated by their unit heads and selected by the Center's permanent faculty through a competitive review process, with final approval by the Board of Trustees. 

Eight iSchool master's students have been named 2025–2026 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Nathaniel Allen Pila earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Mount Holyoke College.

In his role as analyst at Nicor Gas, Eugene Gurevich (BSIS '23) is making sure the natural gas system that millions of people use stays safe and dependable. He credits the iSchool with teaching him technical skills—such as how to clean, transform, and visualize data—as well as how to communicate effectively with different audiences. Gurevich encourages current students to "explore unconventional career paths."

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2026, which will be held virtually from March 23–26 and physically from March 29–April 2 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of this year's conference is "Information Literacies, Authenticity and Use: The Move Towards a Digitally Enlightened Society."