News

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.”  

The School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin welcomes Assistant Professor Ryan Moore. Moore joins the iSchool from Stanford University, where he earned his PhD in Communication and most recently spent a year as a New Map of Life Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity. 

The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin congratulates Prof. Hanlin Li, who in July received a grant from the Wikimedia Research Fund for her proposal “Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata.” The grant, which totals $49,450, involves both outreach to GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and the proposed creation of a tool to help facilitate the use of Wikidata by such organizations. 

The University of Texas School of Information is proud to introduce its latest cohort of PhD graduates, who have successfully navigated the rigors of the dissertation process to emerge as new leaders in the field: Anubrata Das, Siqi Yi, and Chongyan Chen. These scholars are engaged in important research projects that advance, in new and exciting ways, conceptual and practical approaches to information science, where humans and technology meet.

On Friday, May 9, with great pride and amid the enthusiastic cheering of family and friends, the University of Texas at Austin School of Information graduating class of 2025 walked the stage in caps and gowns and received their degrees. Go forth, Class of 2025, and change the world!

This year’s ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025) was held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. A large contingent of iSchool faculty and students was in attendance to present research and connect with others in the field of human-computer interaction.

This year’s Capstone Poster Session was a tour de force of impressive projects, featuring over 150 presentations from undergraduate and graduate students alike. Posters presented ranged from master’s theses and library practica to professional experience projects and focused research reports.