iSchool alumnus and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus (MSLIS '05) has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Angel Down. Kraus, a prolific writer whose works span several genres—children's fiction, horror, science fiction, graphic novels, and comics—learned the good news last week.

PhD student Mubarak Raji has been invited to join the Working Expert Group on AI Governance Interoperability. This group operates under the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies' new AI Governance for Humanity Lab. It supports the Secretary-General's High-level Advisory Body on AI by providing evidence-based analysis for the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will be held in July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Michèle Cloonan (MS '84, PhD '88), dean and professor emerita in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, will deliver the 2026 iSchool Convocation address on Sunday, May 17, at 1:30 p.m. at the Activities and Recreation Center. For those who would like to watch the ceremony online, live video will be available as well as archived for future viewing.

For the Fall 2025 semester, faculty, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who served as instructors for iSchool and Informatics courses were named to the university’s Facilitating Learning Excellence Award.

The iSchool recognized faculty and staff for their contributions to teaching and outstanding service to the School at a ceremony on May 6. Interim Dean Emily Knox presented plaques to the inaugural recipients of the Faculty Teaching Award, Adjunct Teaching Award, and Staff Excellence Award.

The iDEA-iSAIL Joint Laboratory at the University of Illinois received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models Workshop for their paper, "RAG Over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-State Retrieval, and Benchmarking." Paper authors include lab members Jingrui He, professor and MSIM program director; Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, and Zihao Li, computer science PhD students; Jiaru Zou, computer science MS student; Dongqi Fu, alum; as well as Jiawei Han, professor of computer science, and Yada Zhu, IBM collaborator. Chen gave an oral presentation of the research at the workshop, which was held last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was selected out of 206 accepted papers at the workshop.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formally joined the special interest group (SIG) that leads the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ISO standard (21127:2023) for the exchange and integration of wide-ranging scientific and scholarly documentation about the past. 

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been named a recipient of the Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Library and Information Associations (SCECSAL) Excellence Awards 2026 in the category of Young LIS Professional. This is an international award recognizing excellence in library and information science in Africa. 

This week, Professor and Executive Associate Dean J. Stephen Downie was a guest speaker at the Herder Institute in Marburg and the University of Göttingen. Downie, who serves as co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), lectured on the HTRC's "Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction" (TORCHLITE) project.

PhD student Adebola Obayemi discusses her internship with the San Francisco Public Library, where she worked on Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Initiative. She has been invited to present her proposal on digital literacy for incarcerated populations at the Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Convening, which will be held in June in Chicago.