Twelve iSchool master’s students were named 2024-2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Mateo Caballero graduated from Northeastern University with a BA in communications and media and screen studies.

A team including MSIM students Kritika Singh and Jainam Rajput won the Chicago hackathon of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, which was held in over 450 locations worldwide on October 5-6. The students partnered with computer science master's students Shraddhaa Mohan, Jinang Gandhi, and Sai Krishna Rohith and engineering in autonomy and robotics master's student Jugal Upadhyay to form Team Cuberts.

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024-2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Armaan Singh Kalkat graduated from the University of Florida with a BA in linguistics and BS in psychology (with an emphasis on neuroscience).

The highly technical language used in biomedical publications makes it difficult for nonexpert audiences to fully understand their content and draw insights. The BioLaySumm competition focuses on making biomedical research publications more accessible to lay audiences. This year, the winning team was a group from Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab: PhD students Zhiwen (Jerome) You and Shufan Ming and Computer Science master's student Shruthan Radhakrishna. 

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been awarded the 2024 Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Fellowship Award for her distinguished contribution to securing digital legacy to advance local and Indigenous knowledge in development in Kenya and across Africa. She received the award virtually during the DPC's biennial awards ceremony, which took place last month during the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES 2024).

Ten iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2024. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

Master's students Caitlin Herrera and Isabel Ryan have been selected to participate in the 2024-2026 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program. With the goal of attracting MSLIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

Identifying whether online information is faulty or ungrounded is important to ensure information integrity and a well-informed public. This was especially challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic when misinformation spread like wildfire across the Internet. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will integrate diverse human and machine intelligence to examine multimodal data (e.g., text and image) that was produced during the pandemic. His project, "Crowd-Assisted Human-AI Teaming with Explanations," has been awarded a three-year, $599,999 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner and Vanessa Kitzie, associate professor of information science at the University of South Carolina, titled "'In Many Ways, You're This Person Who's Providing Light': Theorizing Embodied Responses to Information Absence with LGBTQIA+ Communities," has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition. 

Professor Emily Knox has been selected for the 2024 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Excellence in Teaching Award. She will receive the award at an awards presentation during the ALISE 2024 Annual Conference, which will be held from October 14-17 in Portland, Oregon.

Fifty-four iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2024. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. 

Jasmine Schreiber, a Leep (MSLIS online) student, has been awarded the Valerie J. Wilford Scholarship Grant for Library Education from the Illinois Library Association (ILA). The award is given to those in pursuit of education in librarianship, including classes, webinars, seminars, or conferences. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo a four-year, $459,000 grant to create inclusive learning environments and advance workplace equity for persons with disabilities in STEM fields. The project will build on Seo's work in developing open-source tools that can augment visual charts into touchable (braille), readable (text), and audible (sound) representations.

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2024-2025 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

A project led by the Game Studies and Design (GSD) program in Informatics has been selected to receive the Illinois Global Institute New Approaches to International Area and Global Studies grant. The project, "Extending Capacities of Area and Global Studies to Shape the Future of Emerging Technologies," is the inaugural recipient of the two-year, $30,000 award.

The iSchool is proud to announce the following appointments: Emily Knox and Yang Wang have been promoted to professor; Elizabeth Hoiem has been promoted to associate professor with indefinite tenure; Associate Professor Maria Bonn has been granted indefinite tenure; Judith Pintar has been promoted to teaching professor; and Martin Wolske has been promoted to teaching associate professor. Their new appointments became effective August 16, 2024.

Associate Professor Rachel Adler, Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, and Assistant Professor Meicen Sun are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois has selected Associate Professor Yun Huang for the 2024-25 Emerging Research Leaders Academy (ERLA). Designed for mid-career faculty to achieve research success, the program provides vital leadership and team science training to pursue large, multi-PI grants, lead campus research initiatives, enhance their own research programs, and ultimately position Illinois for research excellence. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been awarded a $578,677 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-256709-OLS-24), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

MSIM student Peeya Thacker was honored for her internship performance at the 18th Annual Research Park Intern Awards ceremony on July 25. Thacker was named "Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern" for her work at COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab in the University's Research Park.