Doctoral student Craig Willis has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery Index Ecosystem (bioCADDIE)/DataMED team on a pilot project this summer. The award is based on his participation in the 2016 bioCADDIE Dataset Retrieval Challenge.
Each year, the School recognizes a group of outstanding students for their achievement in academics as well as a number of attributes that contribute to professional success. The following student awards were presented at the School's Convocation ceremony on May 14, 2017.
The University of Illinois has long been a leader in accessibility for persons with disabilities. This tradition continues with a new web app called "Access Illinois" created by MS student Mark McCarthy and his team members Matt Arensdorf (undergraduate student, computer science) and Emily Chen (PhD student, computational linguistics). The app earned the team first place in HackCulture.
Doctoral candidate Andrea K. Thomer successfully defended her dissertation, "Site-Based Data Curation: Bridging Data Collection Protocols and Curatorial Processes at Scientifically Significant Sites," on May 8.
Doctoral candidate Cheryl Thompson successfully defended her dissertation, "Data Expertise and Service Development in Geoscience Data Centers and Academic Libraries," on May 8.
iSchool faculty and students will participate in the University of Illinois Social Media Analytics Summit, which will be held on Tuesday, May 2, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The event will take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) auditorium.
With a passion for making books accessible to anyone at any age, Justin Williams made it his mission to seek a career in a library that would allow him to connect with others and make an impact in their lives through the use of stories and information. Williams is set to graduate this May and has a job lined up at as a teen librarian for the White Oak Library District in Lockport, Illinois.
Master's student Ritse Adefolalu has received the Marilyn Kay Maynard Scholarship awarded by the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA). The scholarship is designed to encourage students who wish to gain licensure to work in Illinois as a school librarian, with three scholarships awarded each year.
Doctoral candidate Jinseok Kim successfully defended his dissertation, "The impact of author name disambiguation on knowledge discovery from large-scale scholarly data," on April 24.
Master's student Kortney Rupp has been selected by the Special Libraries Association (SLA) as recipient of the 2017 Marion E. Sparks Award. This award provides funding to attend the 2017 SLA Annual Conference, which will be held June 16-20 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Doctoral candidate Claudia Serbanuta successfully defended her dissertation, "Voices from the Other Side of the Wall: The Case of Romanian Libraries of the 1970s and the 1980s," on April 24.
Master's student Saajan Dehury was part of the winning team at Campus 1871, a startup pitch competition held on March 31-April 2 at 1871, Chicago's Center for Technology and Entrepreneurship.
Professor Alistair Black and doctoral candidate Henry Gabb have been honored by the American Library Association's Library Research Round Table (LRRT) with the 2017 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research.
As a computer networks software developer, Shubhanshu Mishra realized that he was less interested in software than in understanding its users and their social interactions. This insight led him to the iSchool at Illinois, where he is learning skills in his PhD studies that will prepare him for a new career in information science.
Jessica Followell is the 2017 master's student recipient of the Graduate Student Essay Award from the Children's Literature Association. Followell won the award for her essay, "Miracle Cures and Moral Lessons: Victorian Legacies in Contemporary Representations of Children with Disabilities," which examines two plot devices that emerged in children's literature during the Victoria era to discuss disabilities—the miracle cure and the moral lesson.
Master's student Ian Harmon has earned a fellowship from the Society for Scholarly Publishing. Out of 70 applicants, Harmon was chosen as one of twelve to receive the highly competitive fellowship. He will be provided with a wide range of career development opportunities.
Doctoral candidate Karen Baker successfully defended her dissertation, "Data Work Configurations in the Field-Based Natural Sciences: Mesoscale Infrastructures, Project Collectives, and Data Gateways," on April 10.
Master's student Leanna Barcelona uses materials from the past to connect with students today in her artistic and award-winning exhibits. Barcelona's graphic design skills were recognized again this month when she won first prize in the Image of Research competition sponsored by the Graduate College.
Doctoral candidate Mikki Smith successfully defended her dissertation, "Print Networks and Youth Information Culture: Young People, Amateur Publishing, and Children’s Periodicals, 1867-1890," on April 3.
The iSchool was well represented at the international conference, "Information and Power in History," which was held at the VU University Amsterdam on March 16-17. Organized by the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, in collaboration with Radboud University and Utrecht University, the conference attracted scholars from a wide variety of historical and other disciplines.
