Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a $389,810 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify false information about the HPV vaccine and model its impact on risk perceptions.

Adjunct Lecturer Kristen Mattson will present "Information Literacy in Today's World: A Pandemic, Fake News, and Elections," on April 14 as part of the Follett Community Webinar Series. In her talk, Mattson will examine how (and why) information can be misleading and suggest strategies and resources for educators to use when teaching information.

Jessie Chin is an assistant professor in the iSchool and the principal investigator of The Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) Lab. Her research aims to advance knowledge in cognitive sciences regarding evolving human interaction with the contemporary information technologies and translating theories in social and behavioral sciences to the design of technologies and interaction experience to promote health communication and behavior across the lifespan. 

In her work at a women's prison in Illinois, MS/LIS student Christinna Swearingen noticed that while a lot of the prisoners love books, many of them struggle to read. Her response to this problem was to create a Prison Book Club to engage readers at all levels of ability.

Doctoral candidate Alaine Martaus successfully defended her dissertation, "Modeling Participatory Literacy (In Your Pants): An Analysis of Print and New Media Convergence in the Vlogbrothers' YouTube Videos," on April 5.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94), faculty affiliate and editor of Library Trends, and her colleagues from Simmons College have been awarded a National Forum grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Hinchliffe is professor and coordinator for information literacy services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, one of the largest public university libraries in the world.

Martin Wolske, senior research scientist and lecturer, takes a critical look at digital literacy for the twenty-first century in his paper, "A Radical Reconsideration of Digital Literacy." The article was published in the Summer 2016 issue of Information for Social Change.

At the same time that humanity shifts toward digital ways of living and working, the proportion of senior citizens among the world's population is growing. Rejecting the idea that aging is just a matter of declining minds and bodies, iSchool doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra (MS '09, CAS '11) has explored digital literacy among older adults in Champaign-Urbana using information infrastructure theory and the extended case method.

Doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra (MS '09, CAS '11) successfully defended his dissertation, "The Community Informatics of an Aging Society: A Comparative Case Study of Public Libraries and Senior Centers,” on June 20.

Martin Wolske, senior research scientist and lecturer, participated in the event, “Digital Skills: A Gateway to Opportunity,” on June 13 at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. The event was hosted by Chicago Public Library (CPL) and Digital Promise, a nonprofit that works to improve opportunities to learn by encouraging innovation in education.