Announcements

PhD Alum Scott Sikes’ Earns 2022 CCI Outstanding Dissertation Award

At the core of Scott Sikes’ work, both research and professional, is observing and analyzing what people can do when they work together to make their communities and the world a better place. His dissertation, In Our Very Blood: The Use of Social media in the 2018 West Virginia Teachers Strike, follows that same thread.…
Bonnie Carroll Honored for Long-Time Support of CCI and SIS

Bonnie Carroll may have recently retired from Information International Associates (IIA), the information and scientific data management company she founded decades ago in Oak Ridge, but the long-time supporter of the College of Communication and Information is not yet done with data or with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was recently honored by CCI…
MSIS Student Kelsey Badger Named Volunteer of Distinction: Extraordinary Professional Promise

Kelsey Badger came into the School of Information Sciences master’s program with the honor of being accepted into the Collaborative Analysis Liaison Librarians (CALL) program, and she will continue that tradition of excellence with the honor of being named a University of Tennessee, Knoxville Volunteer of Distinction: Extraordinary Professional Promise. She’s also already accepted a position…
Career Coach Bukky Abdul is Here to Help Undergraduate Students Find Career Success

Connecting students with possibilities for their future is truly a passion for Bukky Abdul, career coach for the College of Communication & Information at the Center for Career Development. “I love working with students to help develop themselves, and after my master’s program, I knew I wanted to do career coaching full time. This is…
SIS Launches Research Data Management Certificate Program

The School of Information Sciences recently added another graduate certificate to its offerings, the Research Data Management Certificate (RDMC). “At SIS, we tailor our programs to the workforce needs of employers and provide a relevant curriculum that benefits our students,” said SIS Professor and Director Abebe Rorissa. “The new Research Data Management Certificate and our existing certificate offerings in Health Informatics and Youth…
Alumni Jill Grogg and Teddy Gray Talk About Working at a Consortium

Jill Grogg and Teddy Gray were in the same cohort and both graduated from SIS in 2001 and went their separate ways but into the same career path: academic librarianship. Several years later, their paths converged again when both departed their academic librarian positions and began working for LYRASIS. It’s a job that combines their…
Phd Student Jessica Barfield & Assistant Prof. Jiangen He Get Award to Fund Diversity in Robot-Human Interaction Research

CCI doctoral student Jessica Barfield’s recent research with SIS Professor Dania Bilal looked at diversity and how that affected the way people interact with AI-powered voice digital assistants. Now, in collaboration with SIS Assistant Professor Jiangen He, she’s building on that research by taking similar principles and applying it to human-robot interaction. The two will…
$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…
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…
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…