The iSchool is thrilled to announce the addition of several faculty members! The hiring process began in early 2020 and visits to Madison luckily finished up a few weeks before campus closed facilities in March. The incoming faculty will diversify the iSchool’s research areas, as well as add new strengths to share with students through teaching and collaboration. Continue reading to learn more about them and watch for more detailed individual profiles throughout 2020.
Ian Hutchins worked as a data scientist at the National Institutes of Health. At NIH, he was the developer of the Relative Citation Ratio, a metric used to measure influence at the article, rather than the journal, level. This is an innovative approach to evaluating scientific influence, potentially diversifying the science fields. He will join the iSchool with a research focus in science policy. Ian is a returning Badger—his PhD in Neuroscience is from UW-Madison.
Corey Jackson will join the iSchool as a Postdoctoral Scholar this fall and stay on as a faculty member in Fall 2021. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and teaches in the Berkeley Data Science program. Corey’s research focuses on human interaction with computing systems, particularly regarding crowdsourcing and virtual citizen science projects. He earned a PhD in Information Science & Technology from Syracuse University.
Jiepu Jiang is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He has a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and will soon finish a second PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts. Jiepu’s research aims at understanding, evaluating, and enhancing search systems and conversational systems, such as Siri and Alexa, using behavioral data.
Chaoqun Ni is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa. Her research focuses on understanding scholarly communication in science. Specifically, she has investigated gender disparities in the scientific workforce, doctoral mentoring, and new approaches for scholarly communication research. Chaoqun earned a PhD in Information Science, with a minor in Statistics, from Indiana University-Bloomington.
Adam Rule has a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California-San Diego and is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Oregon Health and Science University. His research emphasizes improving the clarity and reproducibility of data analyses by developing interactive systems that encourage analytical and collaborative best practice. He will join the faculty in Fall 2021.
Jacob Thebault-Spieker is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Virginia Tech and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. His research seeks to understand and mitigate geographic and social biases in computing and crowdsourcing systems, such as Uber and TaskRabbit. Jacob’s work also considers the development of systems and interfaces that may encourage accountability for bias.