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Jacek Gwizdka, Assistant Professor in the School of Information and co-Director of the Information eXperience Lab at University of Texas at Austin, and Dania Bilal, a Professor in the iSchool of Information Sciences at University of Tennessee, and have received a $41,363 Google Research Award for a project titled "Child-friendly search engine results pages (SERPs): Towards better understanding of Google search results readability by children." In this project, Drs. Bilal and Gwizdka will investigate how children read and assess the reading levels of Google's search results pages (SERPs).

From archives to libraries, from digital assets to user experience research, the newest alumni of the iSchool have made their ways into very interesting new career paths. Recently, several May 2014 graduates talked about where they are and what they're doing with their new MSIS degrees. Here are the stories of alumni Catherine Bell, Kristin Bongiovanni, Tim Mapp, and Harry Ostlund.

Catherine Bell

What and where is your new position?

The UT iSchool is pleased to welcome Byron Wallace, who will be joining us this fall as an assistant professor. His research interests are in data mining/machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on applications in health. Byron is presently a research assistant professor at Brown University, where he is based in the Department of Health Services, Policy & Practice and is also affiliated with the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic and Information Processing (BLLIP) in computer science.

When Katie Thomas arrived for library volunteer orientation at Casis Elementary School four years ago, she struck veteran librarian Barbara Nichols as quiet and unassuming.

Nichols remembers mentioning - almost as an afterthought - that she could use some help with the Halloween display case. And suddenly, this unassuming volunteer unleashed a creative force that Nichols said transformed the library. It didn't end with Halloween. Thomas kept delivering - creating robots with the students for one author' visit; a circus theme for another.