Degrees & Programs

In This Section

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: Anita Say Chan
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 technology.

Michelle Bak

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

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.

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.

Si Chen

Advisor: Yun Huang
Research focus: I am interested in designing and examining computing systems for social good, specifically in supporting informal learning under different contexts.

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.

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: Yun Huang
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.

Puranjani Das

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

Smit Desai

Advisor: Michael Twidale
Research focus: My current research interest lies in the usability and prototyping of Voice Interfaces. I am particularly interested in the user's mental model while interacting with these interfaces.

David Eby

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
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.

Yuanxi Fu

Advisor: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: I study how science is argued in this big data and social media era. I also explore the role of data-driven approach and knowledge graphs in accelerating scientific discoveries.

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.

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.

Qiuyan Guo

Advisor: Carol Tilley
Research focus: My research interests focus on information behavior, information literacy, media studies, and social networks. My current project applies qualitative research methods and theories to explore contemporary celebrity fans’ information behaviors on social media, as well as their own understanding of such online practice.

Jim Hahn

Advisors: Jodi Schneider, Karen Wickett
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 identities 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.

Tzu-Kun (Esther) Hsiao

Advisor: Vetle Torvik
Research focus: My research interests are in topics related to knowledge diffusion, citation context, and scholarly communication. In particular, my research combines machine learning and natural language processing techniques with citation analysis to explore how science and technology are cited in scientific literature.

Yuerong Hu

Advisor: J. Stephen Downie
Research focus: My research centers on critical cultural data analytics, which combines theories from digital humanities, cultural analytics, critical data studies, and sociotechnical systems to study cultural data provisions. Specifically, I investigate digitized publications in print curated by digital libraries and user-generated book reviews online.

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.

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.

Chenyue Jiao

Advisor: Peter Darch
Research focus: My research interests lie in scientific practices and policies related to research data curation. My research is to understand how research data is managed, discovered, understood, and used to advance science and human knowledge.

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.

Zachary Kilhoffer

Advisors: Yang Wang, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo
Research focus: I am interested in how we regulate new and emerging technologies to ensure concepts like privacy and security, transparency and accountability, and fairness and ethics. He focuses on AI governance — especially concerning risk assessment, impact assessment, and compliance.

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.

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.

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.

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: Carol Tilley
Research focus: Experience of Black youth in public libraries

Deepanshu Malhotra

Advisor: Bonnie Mak
Research focus: My primary interests lie in the fields of network science, machine learning, and data science. Much of my research is about discovering meaningful patterns, information by developing efficient algorithms for analyzing large networks.

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.

Jaihyun Park

Advisor: Ryan Cordell
Research focus: My research interest is examining linguistic characteristics and network structure of people who have different political ideologies.

Jana M. Perkins

Advisors: Ted Underwood, Zoe LeBlanc
Research focus: I work at the intersections of fields like natural language processing, machine learning, and cultural analytics.

Julia Burns Petrella

Advisor: Carol Tilley
Research focus: My research focuses on youth services and school librarianship, LIS curricula and pedagogy, and the significance of race, racism, and whiteness.

Courtney Richardson

Advisor: Kathryn La Barre
Research focus: I work at the intersection of arts, archives, and African American histories under the sub-area, Art as Information (AAI). AAI involves the study of arts’ role within knowledge production: how we craft, document, process, and circulate information through making art.

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: Jodi Schneider
Research focus: I am interested in science communication, specifically environmental science communication. I want to develop strategies and information behavior models to help make scientific and technical information accessible and understandable to the non-expert audiences.

Lanyu Shang

Advisor: Dong Wang
Research focus: My research interest lies in social sensing and artificial intelligence. I am particularly interested in social media based data mining and analysis, such as misinformation detection and multimodal information analysis.

Wenyi Shang

Advisor: Ted Underwood
Research focus: Addressing humanities problems by investigating data in historical documents, relational databases, and especially digital libraries: large-scale literary texts and bibliographic metadata. Using various methods of digital humanities and computational social science: text mining, machine learning, and social network analysis.

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: Algorithmic fairness with how it pertains to artificial intelligence and machine learning. In particular the real world impacts of unfair technology systems in education and the greater world.

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.

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

Advisor: Anita Say Chan
Research focus: My research interest includes digital information access and information literacy designs, using co-designing methods and community-based research practices, aimed at understanding policies, and bridging the digital divide in Minority communities in Nigeria, Africa, and the United States.

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.

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.

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 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 research in declarative data science employs techniques from data management, visualization, and programming languages, with the objective of enhancing the accessibility and explainability of data science for a wide audience.

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: Dong Wang
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.

Qingxiao Zheng

Advisor: Yun Huang
Research focus: I design and evaluate socially smart AI that supports delightful and safe UX in 2D/3D spaces. As of late, I've been working on developing empathetic and boundary-aware machines that foster human-AI and humans-AI relationaldynamics using real-world user behavioral data.

Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou

Advisors: Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Ted Underwood
Research focus: I'm an HCI/usable security researcher aiming to understand, design, and govern ICT/AI, such as generative AI, blockchain, and social and streaming media. I pay special attention to ICT/AI experience of vulnerable populations, such as older adults, people with disabilities, people in authoritarian regimes, and so on.

Ruohan Zong

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