Emily Valentine joined the iSchool on January 6 as an operations associate. In her new role, she will support the activities of business, finance, and human resources.

Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 grant from the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute to improve modeling climate change and its impact across multiple application domains. He and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and IBM will build Climate Runtime, a computational framework integrating cutting-edge capabilities from climate foundation models and multimodal fusion. This framework will allow for accurate prediction and quantification of weather and climate events and their impact in areas such as finance and agriculture.

The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is pleased to announce the appointment of Melissa A. Wong (MSLIS '94) as editor-in-chief of its quarterly journal Library Trends, effective February 1, 2024. Her experience as a librarian, library director, author, editor, instructor, and instructional designer will advance the breadth of the journal's influence on practice and scholarship in the field of library and information science.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to recognize online deceptions and prevent the spread of elder fraud. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Deepcover, a free new app available for download on Apple's App Store and Google Play that aims to equip older adults with the skills they need to safely navigate the increasingly complex digital world we inhabit.

A new study by PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has uncovered the existence of gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the U.S. and China. The researchers examined public discussion about this topic on the social media platforms Twitter (now X) and Weibo, finding reports of gender bias in the LLMs ChatGPT and Ernie, China's ChatGPT-equivalent.

Seventeen iSchool master's students have been named 2023-2024 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This Spectrum Scholar Spotlight highlights MSLIS student Andrea Serna, whoan earned her bachelor's degree in history from DePaul University in Chicago.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ismini Lourentzou will join the faculty as an assistant professor in January 2024. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab at Virginia Tech.

The PhD degree program at the iSchool celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2023. This profile is part of a special series featuring PhD alumni. Jeanie Austin (PhD '17) is a jail and reentry services librarian at San Francisco Public Library.

Ted Quiballo (MSLIS '17) has been selected for a 2024 I Love My Librarian Award. Honorees were selected for their outstanding public service accomplishments. The award is administered by the American Library Association.

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been inducted as an Illinois Library Luminary. The Illinois Library Luminary Program, an initiative of the Illinois Library Association, recognizes those who have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries. Knox's commitment to intellectual freedom and to shaping the next generation of librarians has touched every library in Illinois.