PhD candidate Jana M. Perkins successfully defended her dissertation, "Scholarship writ large: A data-rich analysis of professionalization in English literary scholarship from 1940 to the present."

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."

PhD candidate Michelle Bak successfully defended her dissertation, "Promoting a Healthy and Comprehensive Diet through Theory-Driven Large Language Models-based Agents," on July 14.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Colin Rhinesmith joined the faculty as a visiting associate professor on January 1, 2025. His position will become permanent following approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as founder and director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan has authored a new book that identifies how the eugenics movement foreshadows the predatory data tactics used in today's tech industry. Her book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was released this month by the University of California Press and featured in the news outlets San Francisco Chronicle and Mother Jones.

Assistant Professor Meicen Sun was selected as a 2024 Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Emerging Scholar and presented her research at the PTC Annual Conference, which was held from January 21-24 in Honolulu, Hawaii. PTC is a global, nonprofit organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Pacific Rim. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual conference, which was held from November 8-11 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine. 

PhD student Morgan Lundy won first place in the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) /Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, "'Have a flare with me!': A content analysis, grounded theory, and collaborative design approach to disability storytelling on TikTok." For the competition, posters were judged on practical/theoretical significance, design and method of research, the student’s oral presentation, and the organization, clarity, and aesthetics of visual materials.

A new study conducted by PhD student Morgan Lundy, which was recently published in the International Journal of Communication, reveals how TikTok's unique features have been used to spread COVID-19 misinformation. Unlike Twitter, which uses a text format, the micro-video format of TikTok makes it more difficult to detect deceptive information.

Doctoral candidate Shadi Rezapour successfully defended her dissertation, "From User-generated Text to Insight; Context-aware Measurement of Social Impacts and Interactions Using Natural Language Processing," on July 20. Her committee included Associate Professor Jana Diesner (chair); Professor Ted Underwood; Roxana Girju, professor of linguistics; and Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel will present her research at the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference (ACRL 2021), which will be held virtually from April 13-16. The theme of this year's conference is "Ascending into an Open Future."

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Dong Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame.

Doctoral candidate Noah Samuel successfully defended his dissertation, "Socio-Physical Characteristics Influencing Collaboration Among Startup Firms in Four Business Incubators," on March 16. His committee included Associate Professor Kate Williams (chair); Professor Michael Twidale; Sonali Shah, associate professor of business administration in the Gies College of Business; and Clara Chu, director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs and Mortenson Distinguished Professor.

Doctoral candidate Kirstin Phelps successfully defended her dissertation, "Collective Leadership for Community Action: A Case-Based Inquiry into Supporting Digital Literacy Initiatives," on August 14.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell has been selected to participate in the Cornell Summer School on Designing Technology for Social Impact. The program, which will be held June 15-19 at Cornell University, is designed to foster a strong cohort of underrepresented researchers working on topics related to the social impact of information technology.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Judith Pintar is now a teaching associate professor. In her new position, in addition to teaching core courses in the BS in information sciences (BS/IS) program, she will develop and teach courses related to game studies and interactive narrative design for both undergraduates and graduate students.

Doctoral candidate Shubhanshu Mishra successfully defended his dissertation, "Information Extraction from Digital Social Trace Data with Applications to Social Media and Scholarly Communication Data," on June 24.