Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."

For a decade, the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) has been offering scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois in exchange for government service after graduation. The program is offered through the University's Information Trust Institute (ITI), an interdisciplinary research center addressing all aspects of information trust.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The Fiddler Fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.

Gregory Knott (MS '17), an administrator for nearly two decades at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a graduate of two U of I System universities, has been appointed secretary of the Board of Trustees and the University, President Tim Killeen announced.

Affiliate Professor Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science, been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, as a 2019 Distinguished Member.

Leep student Meredith Dominguez has received the 2019 Military Libraries Training Workshop Student Award from the Military Libraries Division of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). The award will cover her travel and registration expenses for the Military Libraries Training Workshop, which will be held on December 10-12 in Arlington, Virginia.

MS/LIS student Annabel Pinkney has been awarded a grant from the Caxton Club, a not-for-profit organization devoted to the study and promotion of the book arts. The grant will support her project, "Advanced Studies of the Book Structure," in which Pinkney is creating a portfolio of at least ten book repair treatments of varying difficulty.

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services in the University Library, has been elected as the co-secretary general of the International Steering Committee (ISC) for the UNESCO Global Alliance on Partnerships for Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL). GAPMIL is a groundbreaking effort to promote international cooperation to ensure that all citizens have access to media and information competencies. In consultation with the international agencies, the ISC coordinates the overall implementation of GAPMIL activities.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox and Teaching Associate Professor Judith Pintar have been named Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) Faculty Fellows. This new program, which is supported by the Office of the Provost, "draws upon Fellows' unique perspectives and academic interests to assist CITL staff in identifying faculty needs and reducing barriers to participation in CITL programs, workshops, and events."

MS/IM student Pranay Parmar won first place in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library's Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 22 at the 2019 Scholarly Commons Open House.

Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."

For its defense of the First Amendment rights of incarcerated individuals, the Education Justice Project (EJP) has earned the 2019 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. EJP is a social justice and academic community of incarcerated students, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, family members of the incarcerated, and others. Based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EJP offers educational programs to eligible individuals incarcerated at Danville Correctional Center (DCC), a men’s medium-security state prison 35 miles from the Urbana campus.

Professor Allen Renear, School of Information Sciences, will join the Provost's leadership team as special advisor for strategic initiatives. Renear will be working closely with other University academic and research units to provide analysis, guidance, and leadership with the planning, coordination, and launch of selected strategic initiatives in the University's Strategic Plan, The Next 150. Priority will be given to activities and programs in support of the digital transformation initiative; graduate, professional, and continuing education at the intersection of disciplines; and, workforce-development strategies across the public and private sectors through the Discovery Partners Institute and the Illinois Innovation Network.

As a young professional working to advance her career, Leep student Erica Halpern appreciates the flexibility and convenience of the iSchool's online MS/LIS program. She also is grateful for the George Bonn Scholarship that she received from the School, which removed a "huge financial burden" and has allowed her to focus on her studies.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Associate Professor Victoria Stodden a two-year, $300,000 grant to facilitate research on scientific reproducibility. Her project, "Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science," seeks to improve understanding of how the scientific community can adapt to the increasing use of computing and large-scale data resources. Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by an NSF Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER).

Faculty, staff, and students represented the iSchool at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), held on October 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has received a $200,000 grant from the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) for her project, "Reliable Extraction of Emergency Response Networks from Text Data and Bench-marking with National Emergency Response Guidelines." CIRI is a Center of Excellence of the Department of Homeland Security that aims to enhance the resiliency of the nation's critical infrastructures.

A travel grant provided by the iSchool will allow MS/LIS student Morgan Sherlock to present her research with Laurel Post (MS '19) and Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94) at the Charleston Conference without the extra financial stress. In the paper they will be presenting, "Behind the Gate: Early Career Researchers' Motivations for Using ResearchGate," the coauthors examine the motivations behind why early career researchers use the academic social network site ResearchGate and how publishers and librarians can use these findings to better understand and support their user communities.