Clinical Assistant Professor Ericka Patillo has been both an administrator and teacher of information sciences, and will be serving in both capacities at SIS as she takes on the role of Director of Graduate Studies. 

“I think my combined experiences have equipped me for moving out of the practice and into an arena where I can make contributions to the information professions broadly writ,” she said.

Ben Horne joined SIS in August 2020, and combines his background in computer sciences and information sciences to focus his research on safety in online spaces – particularly as it pertains to news and information consumption.

He hopes to give students at SIS an opportunity to learn computational skills they can apply to information jobs without having to have an extensive background in computation.

Jiangen He said his new position at SIS is ideal for him, both in the description and location, and he couldn’t be more thrilled to start in the fall.

“I learned a lot about the research footprint of the different [SIS] faculty members and I feel there is some connection between my research and the faculty members’ research,” he said. “At the same time, I feel my research is a little bit different than the existing research contributed by faculty members, and that I can give new contributions, but there are connections.”

When Brooke Bixler was looking at universities, she was looking for a specific kind of undergraduate computer science program. She took an IT pathway at her Nashville high school, and the computer programming she learned there was something she definitely wanted to do in the future – but she also really enjoyed linguistics and humanities. She wanted a college program that “bridged the gap” between those fields. She chose the University of Tennessee to pursue computer science, but soon discovered that the program she had been looking for did, indeed, exist.

The John C. Winslow Memorial Scholarship was established in 2019 for both current and prospective MSIS students. Students who are already working in public libraries and who are graduates of the University of Tennessee and/or Vanderbilt University are given special consideration for this scholarship. This year, four students were awarded the scholarship; here’s a little more information about each one of those students:

Sally Austin

SIS Professor Dania Bilal, along with collaborators at two other universities, received a $208,142 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create the IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial intelligence (AI).

After a year in the MSIS program, student Kay P Maye is seeing information in a new light, through what he says is a critical lens that he’s learned to use.

“I got into [information sciences] because I wanted to do something different, but still related to the social sciences, and now I feel like I’m getting a lot of personal stuff out of it,” he said.

Jennifer Chilcoat (’89) admits she didn’t follow a rule handed to her and other SIS students by their professor at the time, Mike Pemberton. He told them to stay at their first job out of grad school for 3-5 years, and then move onto something new…but she ended up staying at the Central Arkansas Library System for 28 years after graduating. Chilcoat, however, may be an exception to that rule, seeing as she just moved into her new role as director of the Arkansas State Library. She replaces Carolyn Ashcraft, who retired July 1.