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.

Jones' coauthored book, The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive,  was recognized by the Society of American Archivists for its outstanding published work related to archives preservation.

Dong Wang (Distinguished Research Scholar), Jessie Chin (Advanced Research Scholar), and Emily Maemura (Early Career Scholar) are the first recipients of the iSchool's Research and Scholarship Awards.

"Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books," originally published by Interim Dean and Professor Emily Knox in 2019, has been selected for the 10th anniversary issue of the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion. 

Doctoral candidate Siyao Cheng was awarded a 2026 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies. The amount awarded for the fellowship is $3,000.

Travis L. Wagner is the recipient of the 2026 James M. Cretsos Leadership Award, which recognizes a new ASIS&T member who has demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities in professional ASIS&T activities.

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is pleased to announce Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo as the winner of the 2026 ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. Since 1980, this annual award has honored the unique teaching contributions of exceptional teachers of information science.

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Kate McDowell will receive the 2026 ASIS&T Research Impact Award sponsored by Rutgers University. 

The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) is pleased to announce the recipients of its annual awards.

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). 

Nicole A. Cooke has been named the 2025 recipient of the Downs Intellectual Freedom Award for her advocacy, groundbreaking research, and dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of library and information science. Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and professor in the College of Information and Communications at the University of South Carolina.

Two iSchool alumni are included in Library Journal's 2026 class of Movers & Shakers, an annual list that recognizes 50 professionals who are moving the library field as a profession. Leah T. Dudak (MSLIS '17) was honored in the Advocates category and Mariella Colon (MSLIS '07) was honored in the Community Builders category. 

The School of Information Sciences recognized student award recipients at the iSchool Convocation on May 17. Awards are based on academic achievements, as well as attributes that contribute to professional success. For more information about each award, including past recipients, visit the Student Awards page. Congratulations to this year's honorees! 

Assistant Professor Ismini Lourentzou has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to develop the next generation of embodied AI agents, systems that can reason, explain, and adapt as they act in the physical world.

Mads Christiansen first heard about the growing presence of social services within libraries in one of their social work classes as an undergraduate.

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.

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.