This year’s ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) kicks off in Bergen, Norway on October 18, and the University of Texas School of Information will be well represented. More than 15 current iSchool faculty and students will be presenting papers and posters at the event.

On Tuesday, September 23, over 250 undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Texas School of Information converged on the Texas Union Ballroom on the Forty Acres to meet potential employers and practice their professional development skills. The event was the second annual iSchool Career Fair, conceived by leadership as a way to bring professional opportunities directly to students – and to help employer partners meet hiring needs. 

The University of Texas School of Information is pleased to announce the hiring of two outstanding scholars for faculty roles beginning next year: Chan Young Park and Jiaxin Pei. Their brief biographical statements can be found below. Both new assistant professors bring with them cutting-edge expertise in large language models and artificial intelligence, with a focus on human contexts, experiences, and impacts.  

As a new school year gets underway at the University of Texas School of Information, the iSchool leadership team gains one new face and sees another familiar figure changing roles. Dr. James Howison, most recently interim associate dean for research, will be stepping into the role of interim associate dean for academic affairs. The vacancy in his former role will be filled by Dr. Ken Fleischmann, the new interim associate dean for research. 

Please join us in welcoming new Assistant Professor David Gray Widder, who starts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information in December 2025. Widder arrives most recently from Cornell University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Life Initiative from 2023-2025. Prior to that, he received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation was titled “Ethics down the AI supply chain: playing with power.”