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.
These new 2026 hires will join new 2025 faculty Ryan Moore and David Widder, both of whom we recently profiled on the iSchool website. We are thrilled to be growing and deepening in our scholarship, teaching, and thought leadership. Please join us in making these new members of the iSchool community feel at home on the Forty Acres!
Chan Young Park
Dr. Park holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and is spending the 2025-26 academic year as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in the AI Interaction and Learning team before she joins the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2026. Her research focuses on enhancing AI technologies by improving their understanding of the social context of language and developing adaptable, personalized AI systems that can be customized to different needs and preferences of users. Prior to Microsoft Research, Dr. Park was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington.
Jiaxin Pei
Dr. Pei holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Michigan and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), where he is affiliated with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the Stanford NLP Group. He will join the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor beginning in Fall 2026. Dr. Pei’s research centers on large language models, human-computer interaction, and computational social science. In his work, he seeks to build human-centered AI systems and understand the impact of AI on people and society.