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Core Faculty

Our exceptional faculty includes nationally recognized, award-winning, innovative teachers and researchers, who combine strong teaching skills with specialty expertise. They are regularly included on the university's lists of "teachers rated excellent by their students," and are active researchers: each of our full-time faculty members has served as principal investigator for at least one grant-funded project in the last two years. GSLIS students have the opportunity to learn not only from our tenure-system faculty (listed below), but also from other expert practitioners, including a strong team of adjunct faculty, affiliated faculty, emeritus faculty members, and Ph.D. student teaching assistants.

Abdul Alkalimat (McWorter)

Professor
Joint Appointment: African American Studies and Research Program
Ph.D. University of Chicago

Office: African American Studies, 1201 W. Nevada MC143
(217)333-7781
-mcworter, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Digital inequality, community informatics, and African American intellectual history.

Ann Bishop

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Syracuse

Office: 337 LIS
Office Hours: Fall 2008: Thursdays, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
(217)244-3299
-abishop, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Use and impact of computer-based information systems; social equity in access to information; human-centered approaches to designing and evaluating information systems.

Chip Bruce

Professor
Joint Appointment: Engineering, Bioengineering, Curriculum & Instruction
Ph.D. Texas at Austin

Office: 303 LIS
(217)244-3576
-chip, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Community informatics; environments to support inquiry-based learning; collaboration in knowledge making; new literacy practices.

Susan G. Davis

Professor
Joint Appointment: Institute of Communications Research
Ph.D. Pennsylvania

Office: Inst. of Communications Research, 235 Gregory Hall, MC-463
(217)244-4240
-sgdavis, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

The role and significance of vernacular culture; the ethnography of commercial culture; the politics of culture and cultural research.

J. Stephen Downie

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Western Ontario

Office: 338 LIS
(217)265-5018
-jdownie, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Design and evaluation of IR systems, including multimedia music information retrieval; the political economy of internetworked communication systems; database design; Web-based technologies.

David Dubin

Research Associate Professor
Ph.D. Pittsburgh

Office: 330 LIS
(217)244-3275
-ddubin, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

The foundations of information representation and description. Issues of expression and encoding in documents and digital information resources.

Jon Gant

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon

Office: 334 LIS
(217)333-5975
-jongant, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Electronic government, information technology and organization design; social networks, knowledge management, and information technology; strategic management of information systems; and geospatial technologies.

Les Gasser

Professor
Joint Appointment: Computer Science
Ph.D. California, Irvine

Office: 321 LIS
(217)265-5021
-gasser, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Coordination of information; coordination theory/tools; multiagent systems; manufacturing research; intensive industry liaison; R&D project management.

Caroline Haythornthwaite

Professor
Ph.D. Toronto

Office: 204 LIS
(217)244-7453
-haythorn, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the Internet; information exchange via CMC; online communities; e-learning; social network analysis; collaboration; social informatics; community informatics

Bryan Heidorn

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Pittsburgh

Office: National Science Foundation, Arlington VA
(703)292-8470
-pheidorn, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

The expansion of the functionality of automatic methods for semantic markup, natural language understanding, spatial language, information extraction; human-computer information system design, ecological information management.

Christine Jenkins

Associate Professor and Director, CTR for Children's Books
Joint Appointment: Gender and Women's Studies
Ph.D. Wisconsin-Madison

Office: 23B LIS
(217)244-7452
-cajenkin, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

History of youth services librarianship as women's history; censorship and intellectual freedom issues; representations of minority-status groups in children's and young adult literature; reading engagement; reader-response research, and the reader-text interaction.

Lori Kendall

Associate Professor
Ph.D. UC-Davis

Office: 304 LIS
Office Hours: Fall 2008--Wednesdays 10:00am-12:00pm and by appintment.
(217)244-8829
-loriken, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Online community and identity; the social aspects of computing; and gender and technology.

Kathryn La Barre

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Indiana

Office: 301 LIS
Office Hours: Fall 2008--Tuesdays 12:00pm-1:00pm; Thursdays 12:00pm-1:00pm and by appointment.
(217)244-4449
-klabarre, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Information organization and access systems and structures; interactions between theoretical approaches in information organization and access and current practices in digital environments; historical and theoretical foundations of library and information science; cognitive processing of information; category and concept formation.

W. John MacMullen

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Office: 332 LIS
(217)265-0741
-wjohn, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Biomedical informatics; health sciences librarianship; human information interaction; scholarly communication.

Bonnie Mak

Assistant Professor
Joint Appointment: Program in Medieval Studies
Ph.D. University of Notre Dame

Office: 230 LIS
(217)244-0154
-bmak, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

The interpenetration of manuscript, print, and digital cultures; the cultural production and circulation of knowledge; palaeography and diplomatics; manuscript studies; book history; medieval and early modern collecting; history of archives and libraries

Jerome McDonough

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Berkeley

Office: 202 LIS
(217)244-5916
-jmcdonou, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Digital libraries; digital preservation; metadata design; human-computer interaction and user interface design; socio-technical and participatory design approaches to information systems development.

Kate McDowell

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Illinois

Office: 222 LIS
(217)244-8957
-kmcdowel, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Library services for youth; literature for children and young adults; history of gender in children's librarianship; gender in children's literature; technology in youth services librarianship; distance education pedagogy.

Carole Palmer

Associate Professor and Director, CIRSS
Ph.D. Illinois

Office: 314 LIS
(217)244-0653
-clpalmer, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

information use in scientific and scholarly work; technologies to support interdisciplinary research, scientific discovery, and inquiry in the humanities; impact of interoperability efforts on the use of digital collections.

Allen Renear

Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research
Ph.D. Brown

Office: 213 LIS
(217)265-5216
-renear, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

How digital documents function as knowledge representation systems: developing models of how documents organize and structure knowledge and then exploring how these models can improve document-intensive applications such as digital libraries, scientific collaboration systems, publishing systems, educational technology, and humanities textbases.

Dan Schiller

Professor
Joint Appointment: Department of Speech Communication
Ph.D. Pennsylvania

Office: 236 LIS
(217)244-3569
-dschille, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Telecommunications history; information policy; role of cultural production in the socioeconomic development of the market system.

Linda C. Smith

Professor and Associate Dean
Joint Appointment: Coordinated Science Lab
Ph.D. Syracuse

Office: 112E LIS
Office Hours: Fall 2008--Monday-Friday 7:30am-5:00pm and by ap pointment.
(217)333-7742
-lcsmith, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Information system design; education for library and information science; impact of new technologies on reference and information services.

Deborah Stevenson

Asst Professor & Editor, Bulletin of the Ctr for Children's
Ph.D. University of Chicago

Office: 23A LIS
(217)244-9305
-dstevens, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Children's literature and contemporary culture; history of children's literature; genre theory.

Carol Tilley

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Indiana

Office: 220 LIS
(217)265-8105
-ctilley, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

History of youth services librarianship, children's print culture, information inquiry and instruction in school libraries, and media literacy.

Vetle Torvik

Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Louisiana State University

Office: 221 LIS
(217)244-7792
-vtorvik, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Mathematical optimization; computational statistics; text and data mining; literature-based discovery; bioinformatics.

Michael Twidale

Associate Professor
Joint Appointment: Computer Science, Beckman Institute
Ph.D. Lancaster (UK)

Office: 302 LIS
(217)265-0510
-twidale, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Computer-supported cooperative working and learning; collaborative technologies in digital libraries and museums; user interface design and evaluation; user error analysis; visualization of information and algorithms; the development of interfaces to support the articulation of plans, goals, and beliefs.

John Unsworth

Dean
Joint Appointment: English, Library
Ph.D. Virginia

Office: 112A LIS
Office Hours: Spring 2008: By appointment.
(217)333-3281
-unsworth, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Humanities computing; digital libraries; electronic publishing.

Terry L. Weech

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Illinois

Office: 201 LIS
(217)333-0646
-weech, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

Collection management; evaluation of library services; library education; library cooperation and networking.

Kate Williams

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Michigan

Office: 344 LIS
(217)244-9128
-katewill, at uiuc.edu-

Research Interests

The relationship between social networks, social capital, and the use of information and communications technology, particularly in low-income communities.