School of Information Sciences

Doctoral Students

The iSchool is home to a diverse body of students who pursue research in a variety of fields. Meet some of our current doctoral students below.

Joanna Adewunmi

Advisor: Melissa Ocepek
Research focus: I am interested in studying the information behavior and participation of women in STEM with a focus on women in technology in Africa and America.

Rawdah Alfadhley

Advisor: J. Stephen Downie
Research focus: Academic librarianship and information access.

Ocean Val Arboniés-Flores

Advisor: Melissa Ocepek
Research focus: My research interests include histories of digital technology, science and technology studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, and feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial/anticolonial approaches to media and information technologies.

Michelle Bak

Advisor: Jessie Chin
Research focus: Developing a digital health solution based on using NLP and psychological theories to promote preventive health behaviors

Gowri Balasubramaniam

Advisors: Rachel M. Magee, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo
Research focus: AI ethics and age-appropriate design; governance of AI systems as experienced by children and youth; participatory design with marginalized communities; and privacy, data, and youth agency in datafied environments.

Clara Belitz

Advisors: Nigel Bosch, Jana Diesner
Research focus: My research interests concern algorithmic justice and bias in artificial intelligence. I am particularly interested in the way our epistemological and statistical assumptions shape how we measure fairness, and thus the information to which we have access, affecting both our technical and non-technical approaches to AI justice.

Kainen Bell

Advisor: Anita Say Chan
Research focus: My research follows the work of digital rights activists and organizers of anti-surveillance campaigns in Brazil who protest the use of facial recognition cameras for monitoring public security. I aim to learn how Afro-Brazilians collaborate and practice solidarity to resist and prevent the abuse of surveillance technologies in their communities. My research involves using Critical Data Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Decolonial Methods, and Community-Based Research. Ultimately, I aim to develop frameworks for collaboration between communities, activists, and academics.

Maya Bergamasco

Advisor: Sarah Park Dahlen
Research focus: My research focuses on Chinese transracial transnational adoptees who use consumer genetic technologies to find genetic relatives and learn more about their health history. This research combines information seeking behavior, critical adoption studies, Asian American studies, and East Asian studies.

Jack Brighton

Advisor: Martin Wolske
Research focus: I'm interested in information history, socio-technical design, and the origins and consequences of information systems. My research explores information systems and practices from a sociological perspective; the social, economic, and political context of their design, implementation, and governance; and the impact of historical and contemporary systems on human welfare and social justice.

Jingyuan Chen

Advisor: Matthew Turk
Research focus: Currently I am interested in large random measurable combinatorial structures such as Graphons and their applications in information theory and explainable neural networks. I am also interested in computer assisted proofs, recommender systems and the pedagogy of statistics.

Haocong Cheng

Advisor: Yun Huang
Research focus: My main interest is on human-computer interaction (HCI) and social computing: observing how people use (or suffer from) technologies or social media and designing tools that could hopefully help them overcome the difficulties in using technologies. I would also like to apply my knowledge on HCI to public transportation and tourism domains, disciplines that I interested in the most, by helping people make their travel or transit plans, enjoy their trips more, and organize their travel memories.

Siyao Cheng

Advisor: Melissa Ocepek
Research focus: Siyao Cheng is interested in copyright education, library and information science (LIS) pedagogy, and everyday information behavior.

Jessica Choi

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: My research interest lies in natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Specifically, I'm interested in (explainable) misinformation detection, algorithmic bias, and responsible AI.

Abhinav Choudhry

Advisor: Rachel Adler
Research focus: My research interests pivot around human-centred computing. I am interested in how to harness advances in new-age technology and AI, ubiquitous computing, and the omnipresence of social media towards everyday health and well-being.

Becca Cohen

Advisor: Ted Underwood
Research focus: My research interests currently lie in how power structures shape systems of modeling and interpreting the cultural reception of various forms of media. This includes processes such as data cleaning, visualization, and algorithmic processes, as well as their downstream effects in LLMs such as content moderation and censorship of, or stereotypes and overgeneralizations of marginalized communities. My scholarship uses an intersectional feminist, gender studies, and de-colonial lens, close reading and technical skills to achieve a unique digital humanities approach to these issues.

Puranjani Das

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: I am interested in the topics of information organization, ontology and knowledge graph development, and knowledge representation.

David Eby

Advisor: Kate McDowell
Research focus: My research interests include investigating health misinformation and information quality on social media platforms. I want to understand how the pandemic was conveyed and received on TikTok, a short-form video format social media platform. I am also interested in argumentation, social justice, and scholarly communication.

Daniel Evans

Advisors: J. Stephen Downie, Zoe LeBlanc
Research focus: My research focuses on natural language processing to explore the history of the book and digital archives. More recently, my work has been centered on equity of access and cultural analytics in digital libraries.

Livia Ferreira

Advisor: David Dubin
Research focus: I work with the intersections of information, culture, and society, with particular attention to memory and cultural heritage. Currently, my focus is on the preservation and conservation of video games as cultural and informational objects.

Yuanxi Fu

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: I study how science is argued in this big data and social media era. I also explore what the future of science may look like with the advent of AI scientists.

Jamillah R. Gabriel

Advisor: Rachel M. Magee
Research focus: My research focuses on issues at the nexus of information and race and interrogates how these issues impact Black people and communities. My dissertation project examines the information behavior of Black people within the context of cultural heritage institutions.

Yeaeun Gong

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: Misinformation and explainable AI (XAI)

Sarah Griebel

Advisors: Ted Underwood, J. Stephen Downie
Research focus: I'm interested in the intersection of natural language processing and computational social sciences, particularly in the realm of literary machine translation.

Michael Gryk

Advisor: Bertram Ludäscher
Research focus: My research interests are in scientific data management; computational reproducibility; data curation; workflows and provenance; information organization, representation and access.

Yingjun Guan

Advisors: Vetle Torvik, Halil Kilicoglu
Research focus: My current academic interests include data mining, text mining, machine learning, and data visualization, specifically on how DM and TM can help analyze; sociotechnical data such as medical data, publication data, or geographical data, etc.; how to apply different ML algorithms to different projects and invent new ones; and how to better visualize and storytell the data.

Evan Guerra

Advisors: Halil Kilicoglu, Catherine Blake
Research focus: My research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), biomedical NLP, and deep learning. I specialize in applying large language models to scientific and health-related domains, particularly smell and taste perception, biomedical text mining, and AI for Science.

Jim Hahn

Advisor: Bertram Ludäscher
Research focus: Syntax, grammar(s), and semantics of knowledge organization structures; contextual uses of language as meaning; the metadata description as a linguistic domain; information retrieval as primarily linguistic activity; development of automation and semi-automation by knowledge workers; community developed and supported algorithms.

Kanyao Han

Advisor: Jana Diesner
Research focus: My research interests include data mining and social computing, specifically in extracting information and features from text and behavioral data through NLP and network science, and using them to analyze and predict social phenomena through statistical and machine learning models.

Yingying Han

Advisor: Martin Wolske
Research focus: My research intersects digital preservation, critical archival and cultural heritage studies, and community engagement. My work adopts critical theories and employs community-based approaches to explore how Asian American and Asian immigrant communities digitally curate and preserve their experiences and histories.

Muhammad Hassan

Advisor: Masooda Bashir
Research focus: I am broadly interested in Security and Privacy, studying vulnerabilities exploiting users' trust in the web and mobile app ecosystem. My research goal is to enhance users' privacy and security in the digital world.

Gibong Hong

Advisors: Halil Kilicoglu, Jana Diesner
Research focus: My main research interests lie in the application of NLP to solve real-world problems, especially in social, biomedical, and educational domains.

Xinhui Hu

Advisor: Michael Twidale
Research focus: Xinhui Hu’s research focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction and user-centered design, with a particular emphasis on mental models and empathy virtual reality. Hu has contributed her expertise as a user-experience researcher to a diverse range of interdisciplinary projects, spanning fields such as digital fabrication, health care, library science, and data visualization.

Vuyokazi Jamieson

Advisor: Clara M. Chu
Research focus: I’m interested in radical youth literacy, the role of school libraries in education, and community-based participatory research (CBPR).

Karen Jenkins

Advisor: Emily Knox
Research focus: Delving into the uncharted territories of digital literacy and blockchain's impact on education. Focused on unraveling the mysteries of data usage, sharing, retrieval, and access to information to take action. Topics aligning with emerging technologies in analytics, broadband, and workforce.

Sullam Jeoung

Advisor: Jana Diesner
Research focus: My research interest is in ensuring the safety of language models. I hope to contribute to the research that ensures robust, and ethical implications of language models.

Lan Jiang

Advisors: Nigel Bosch, Halil Kilicoglu
Research focus: My research primarily focuses on natural language processing, with an emphasis on text assessments across various contexts, including education and biomedical domains. I am also interested in uncovering and eliminating bias in natural language processing to improve fairness.

Xiaoliang Jiang

Advisor: Vetle Torvik
Research focus: My research interest lies in Data Mining, Text Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, especially on how machine learning can help us to analyze unstructured text data and sociotechnical data like social media, geographical, and scientific publication data.

Haibo Jin

Advisor: Haohan Wang
Research focus: Development of trustworthy machine learning through robustness, interpretability, and alignment.

Sanchita Kamath

Advisor: JooYoung Seo
Research focus: Sanchita’s focus area is data visualization for blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals. She has worked on accessibility research and projects and is currently exploring the avenues and opportunities of implementing accessibility features and paradigms in Generative AI.

Jean Kanengoni

Advisor: Emily Knox
Research focus: I am interested in library and information services provision for the marginalized community in Africa, especially historically marginalized communities and those who have had to leave their homes due to environmentally, political, social or economic problems. My focus will be on identifying existing library and information services to the marginalized communities, assess their impact on the ground and identify best practices.

Smirity Kaushik

Advisor: Yang Wang
Research focus: I work in HCI and User Experience Research domain in social computing systems research, focusing on privacy policies and usable privacy and security. I am particularly interested in exploring user-centered privacy research ideas to resolve socio-technical challenges at the intersection of privacy, policy, and HCI.

Gladys Kemboi

Advisor: Karen Wickett
Research focus: Decolonization of knowledge and digital preservation of Indigenous knowledge in addressing climate change among the Keiyo Community in Kenya.

Matthew Kollmer

Advisor: Ryan Cordell
Research focus: My primary research applies text mining, data science, and machine learning to the study of U.S. literary history and literary regionalisms. I have accompanying interests in book history, bibliography, and print culture. I’m also interested in digital humanities pedagogy.

Mengfei Lan

Advisor: Halil Kilicoglu
Research focus: My research interests is in natural language processing. To be specific, science text classification, name entity recognition and relation extraction.

William Langston

Advisor: Michael Twidale
Research focus: My research focuses on the intersection of digital innovation and economic development. I want to lend solution-based expertise to initiatives concerning workforce & tech-talent development, new venture creation, and urban planning.

Michelle Lê

Advisor: Sarah Park Dahlen
Research focus: Vietnamese American History, Vietnamese American youth literature, Asian American youth literature, Viet Nam War and Memory and Oral History Archives

Theodore Dreyfus Ledford

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: My interests cover argumentation, network analysis and social epistemology to address how expertise is used in the construction of knowledge.

HaeJin Lee

Advisors: Nigel Bosch, Jana Diesner
Research focus: Human-computer Interaction, AI, data mining, and learning analytics.

Lan Li

Advisor: Bertram Ludäscher
Research focus: My research interests focus on data cleaning and data provenance. The goal is to use the provenance model to fix the reproducibility, reusability, and transparency issues across research areas, such as data cleaning, natural language processing, data curation.

Lucian Li

Advisor: Zoe LeBlanc
Research focus: Digital humanities, specifically using natural language processing and other computational techniques to analyze cultural and historical documents at scale.

Meng Li

Advisor: Bertram Ludäscher
Research focus: Mobile health, explainable AI, and scientific workflow.

Yifan Liu

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: Trustworthy machine learning and social media

Morgan Lundy

Advisor: Jessie Chin
Research focus: Toward the goal of disability community empowerment through ICTs, my research centers on understanding and co-designing social health information encounters, such as patient-to-patient information sharing online, information creation behaviors through health storytelling on social media—particularly on TikTok—and patient-to-agent conversation (VUI).

Jessie Mae Maimone

Advisor: Rachel M. Magee
Research focus: Experience of Black youth in public libraries

Deepanshu Malhotra

Advisors: J. Stephen Downie, Vetle Torvik
Research focus: Science of science is my central field while natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and network science provide methods and perspectives.

Phoebe Mbuvi

Advisor: Renee Hendricks
Research focus: The electronic health record and how to create either a tool or suggest a new way of writing patient notes to help clinicians gather health information on their patients more efficiently and in less time.

Shufan Ming

Advisor: Halil Kilicoglu
Research focus: My research focuses on biomedical natural language processing, specifically on integrating external knowledge into large language models to enhance their performance in tasks such as relation extraction and automatic text summarization.

Owen Monroe

Advisors: Elizabeth Hoiem, Zoe LeBlanc
Research focus: My research is in the digital humanities, and using computational methods to answer humanities questions. I am particularly interested in literary study, education, and the history of pedagogy.

Adebola Obayemi

Advisors: Martin Wolske, Colin Rhinesmith
Research focus: My research examines how the design of technology can either bridge or deepen inequities in access and also investigates how trauma-informed frameworks can guide more equitable interventions to the digital divide, reentry challenges, and information needs of marginalized and underserved communities.

Precious Olalere

Advisor: Jessie Chin
Research focus: I study how people access and use health information, with a focus on promoting equity. My work examines how emerging technologies and AI-driven systems can facilitate aging populations' access to and evaluation of health information in a digital health context.

Emma X. Paulson

Advisor: Sarah Park Dahlen
Research focus: My research sits between information studies, Asian American studies, and adoption studies. I investigate how transracial, transnational adoptees use public media representation of Asian American communities in television and film to construct and make sense of their racial identities.

Jana M. Perkins

Advisor: Ryan Cordell
Research focus: I'm an expert in data-rich systems thinking — ask me about my doctoral dissertation and I'll be glad to tell you all about it. What this means is that I’m trained in using statistical models to analyze complex patterns in human behaviour, from how users act to how companies function.

Stephanie Posey

Research focus: My work looks at the Radical Imagination in grassroots information ecologies, in particular, youth activist communities.

Charan Pushpanathan Prabavathi

Advisor: Michael Twidale
Research focus: My research interests focus on human–AI interaction to create active learning environments, collaborative systems, and novel interfaces that augment human intellect and bridge the gap between expert and novice users. I work at the intersection of HCI, design research, CSCW, AI, and learning sciences.

Kexin Quan

Advisor: Jessie Chin
Research focus: My research interest lies in human-computer interaction, focusing on how AI can enhance decision-making, creativity, and design by providing intelligent feedback and assistance in complex, information-rich environments.

Mubarak Raji

Advisor: Masooda Bashir
Research focus: I am interested in researching information policy, data privacy, and AI governance, with a specific focus on the United States, Europe, and Africa.

Malik Salami

Advisors: Jodi Schneider, Vetle Torvik
Research focus: My research interests lie in the intersection of scholarly communication, scientometrics and other related areas. My interests keep evolving.

Togzhan Seilkhanova

Advisor: Melissa Ocepek
Research focus: I study political economy of information, how information is transformed by social/economic/political forces to create a “climate of opinion,” and how ideological and political beliefs impact information behavior.

Hannah Smith

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: I am interested in the generation and quality assessment of data for natural language processing tasks as well as considerations of the differences in textual data among different domains, especially regarding the degree of structure or objectivity in a domain.

Frank Stinar

Advisor: Nigel Bosch
Research focus: AI ethics and algorithmic fairness. Examining how to build fair and ethical systems for education and machine learning.

Lettycia Terrones

Advisor: Elizabeth Hoiem
Research focus: My project examines aesthetic/political strategies that occur visually and textually in Chicana-created picturebooks. My project considers how these strategies contribute to library services for children and families.

Marina Tinone

Advisor: Sarah Park Dahlen
Research focus: My research interest is in diverse literature, especially in regard to the way publishers and other corporations advertise or otherwise represent race and social justice issues to young audiences.

Tre Tomaszewski

Advisor: Jessie Chin
Research focus: My research interests reside at the intersection of cognitive psychology and technology, specifically, AI and information networks, AI-assisted cognition, and the ethics of persuasive technologies. Currently, I am investigating detection of misinformation and mitigation strategies.

Ebubechukwu Uba

Advisors: Colin Rhinesmith, Rachel Adler
Research focus: My research focuses on the intersection of educational technology designs, community informatics, and technology policy analysis. I explore how educational technologies are designed to either empower or exclude specific communities, particularly in rural and low-resource contexts, through co-design frameworks, digital equity models, and critical technology design theories.

Valentine Ugwuoke

Advisor: Meicen Sun
Research focus: AI policies, particularly the legal, regulatory, and ethical dimensions of deepfakes.

Isabella Viega

Advisor: Ryan Cordell
Research focus: My research aims to understand how the typewriter, as a gendered technology, enables queer modernist poetics. Through the lenses of book history and print culture, I hope to explore how the typewriter can facilitate literary political dissent, historically and presently.

Ryan Wang

Advisor: Catherine Blake
Research focus: Biomedical informatics, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence.

Xiaoning Wang

Advisor: Ted Underwood

Emily Wegrzyn

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: My interest is in applying information literacy (IL) approaches to disrupt adversarial information operations (IO). I wish to explore ways gamification can strengthen one’s IL, and the potential for artificial intelligence to help verify information, boosting individual cognitive security.

Tianxin Wei

Advisor: Jingrui He
Research focus: My research focuses on bridging the gap between transferability and personalization in machine learning, particularly in large language models (LLMs), with applications across modalities and disciplines.

Chris Wiley

Advisor: Sarah Park Dahlen
Research focus: My research interests are on topics related to racial ideologies, race, digital studies, and intersectionality.

RaShauna Wright

Advisor: Clara M. Chu
Research focus: My current research explores the intersections of social justice, public library service models, and perceptions of information service professionals. I am also interested in research centered around digital literacy and youth, and diversity issues in libraries.

Ziwei (Maggie) Wu

Advisor: Jingrui He
Research focus: I am interested in the design of fairness-aware machine learning algorithms and their applications in real-world tasks.

Yilin Xia

Advisors: Matthew Turk, Bertram Ludäscher
Research focus: My work focuses on data management, data visualization, and knowledge representation and reasoning, where I aim to address data challenges using declarative approaches.

Ruichen Yao

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: My research interests lie in AI for social good and human-centered AI, with a particular focus on social sensing approaches that leverage multimodal digital traces to understand societal patterns and human behavior.

Zhiwen (Jerome) You

Advisors: Jana Diesner, Yue Guo
Research focus: My interests are broadly in natural language processing, bias/fairness of large language models (LLMs), and AI for health. I am particularly interested in developing transparent and trustworthy language models for clinical and biomedical applications. Some of my current focuses include explainable LLM-based clinical reasoning , factual consistency evaluation, and gender bias probing in LLMs.

Yaman Yu

Advisor: Yang Wang
Research focus: My current interests are usable security and privacy, privacy policies and AI in privacy. I am passionate about building enhanced mechanisms and tools to help people, especially vulnerable populations, ensure their privacy. I am especially interested in leveraging AI and machine learning techniques to develop privacy systems, policies and data compliance.

Andrew Zalot

Advisors: Emily Knox, Rachel M. Magee
Research focus: My research focuses on intellectual freedom and censorship in schools and libraries. My current work focuses on examining discourse in online and local communities, specifically how they engage with one another when a book is banned.

Huimin Zeng

Advisor: J. Stephen Downie
Research focus: My research interest lies in the intersection of social sensing and adversarial machine learning.

Guangchun Zheng

Advisor: Kate Williams
Research focus: My research interest focuses on community informatics, especially on topics related to digital divide and digital inequality. I am also interested in people's everyday information behavior.

Ruohan Zong

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: I am interested in human-centered AI and AI for social good.

School of Information Sciences

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Champaign, IL

61820-6211

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Email: ischool@illinois.edu