Hillary Tune

Alum Ari Baker Steps Into Their New Role as Tenn-Share Director

After working 13 years at the same place, Ari Baker decided it was time to see where else they could leverage their information sciences skills. Though Baker loved being a librarian at the Blount County Public Library, they realized their entire career had been spent there. That’s when they saw the job opening for the…
$737K NSF Grant Awarded to HBCU Research Project that Includes Assistant Professor Jiangen He

SIS Assistant Professor Jiangen He is part of a project recently awarded a $737,596 National Science Foundation grant that will take an in-depth, systematic approach to explore why faculty join or leave historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Besides He, there are three other institutions and four other researchers involved in the three-year-long project. They…
Student Spotlight: Matthew Cowan Brings Knowledge Management to Cybersecurity

Featured Student: Matt Cowan Location: Knoxville, Tennessee Education/Career Background: I finished undergraduate in 2014 at the University of Alabama, where I studied geology. Between then and now, I worked largely in real estate and hospitality. Why information sciences? I came to the School of Information Sciences because I realized there’s such a gap in how…
PhD Student Jessica Barfield Named ASIS&T Emerging Scholar for AI Voice Research Done with Professor Dania Bilal

A collaboration between the College of Communication and Information PhD student and School of Information Sciences professor has resulted in innovative research that reaches into the future of AI-powered voice digital assistants and explores how it can be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. This research resulted in a co-authored paper and an award for the doctoral…
SIS Lecturer and CCI PhD Alum Iman Tahamtan Takes on UX Researcher Role at JP Morgan

It’s been an exciting and transitional summer for Iman Tahamtan, a recently graduated College of Communication and Information doctoral program alum, and now SIS lecturer. Not only did he successfully defend his dissertation in July, but he also stepped into a new role as a senior user experience researcher for the Machine Learning and Intelligence…
Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski Earns NASKO’s Best Paper Award Examining Aristotle’s ‘Categories’

What does an ancient Greek philosopher have to do with information sciences? SIS Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski answered that in a spring 2021 special topics course, Knowledge of Organization Systems, when he had students read and discuss Aristotle’s writing, “Categories.” Not only did it provide some interesting discourse, it inspired Dobreski to write a paper,…
Professor Dania Bilal: Inaugural IDEA Institute on AI at UT a Success

After a lot of hard work and planning, the inaugural IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial Intelligence was successfully launched and completed this July at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “It exceeded all our expectations and was the first nationwide event, as far as we know, to train people in aspects of AI…
MSIS Student Diona Eberhart Layden Awarded ALA Spectrum Scholarship

Diona Eberhart Layden is a licensed attorney and has served as a judicial law clerk for the Tennessee Supreme Court, worked in the Davidson County District Attorney General’s Office, and currently serves as a Guardian ad Litem in the Davidson County Juvenile Court. But after two decades of working as a lawyer, she decided she…
MSIS Alumna Lara Marler Creates 68 Kindergarten Readiness Backpacks for Bridge Refugee Services in Knoxville

While she was in the MSIS program, Lara Marler (’17) started a passion project to get books into the hands of refugee children in Knoxville, and that project recently came to full fruition in the form of 68 backpacks filled with tools to ready Swahili-speaking children for kindergarten. Each backpack has a picture book in…
MSIS Student Melinda Sandkam Awarded Lemoncello Scholarship

Melinda Sandkam has always had a heart for certain endeavors, including the education of children and youth, and also helping people find the answers they need. This has guided her career, which includes positions as a hotel concierge, church program director, and preschool director. So perhaps it’s not unusual that she decided to pursue information…