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Vetle Torvik and Jana Diesner have been hired as assistant professors at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois.
For the past three years, Torvik has held a visiting appointment at GSLIS, teaching and conducting research in the areas of data/text mining, information processing, bioinformatics, literature-based discovery, and author name disambiguation. His research tends to focus on computational statistics and mathematical optimization. One of his recent projects, funded by the National Science Foundation, is to develop a database that links Medline authors and USPTO inventors through identification of individuals who authored both papers and patents, and to study the collaborative networks of these so-called gatekeepers of the science and technology interface.
Prior to coming to GSLIS, Torvik served as research assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from St. Olaf College in 1995, an M.S. in operations research from Oregon State University in 1997, and a Ph.D. in engineering science from Louisiana State University in 2002.
“We’re very pleased that Professor Torvik will be joining GSLIS on the tenure track,” Dean John Unsworth said. “He’s been a valued research collaborator even before coming to this campus, and in his time as a visiting faculty member at GSLIS he has demonstrated the ability to make difficult concepts approachable for students.”
Diesner is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Computation, Organizations and Society program (COS) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), School of Computer Science, Institute for Software Research. She received her M.S. in COS from CMU and her M.A. (Magister Artium) in communication science from Dresden University of Technology in Germany. She will join the GSLIS faculty in January 2012.
Diesner’s research mission is to contribute to the computational analysis and better understanding of the interplay and co-evolution of information and the functioning of socio-technical networks. Her research focuses on networks from the business, science, and geopolitical domain. She is particularly interested in factors that impede the sustainable development of networks and their wider context, especially conflicts and crime, and in covert information and covert networks.
Dean Unsworth said, “Professor Diesner’s work is a great fit for GSLIS, and it will provide added depth to our social, community, and organizational informatics research. Like Professor Torvik, she is a dedicated and effective teacher. “
In addition to her academic work, Diesner is encouraging K-12 school students, especially women and minorities, to pursue careers in science and computing. She has created a program called “Computational Thinking” that is run at a public school in Pittsburgh, PA. Her long-term goals with this work are to generate higher diversity and stronger participation in computing, and to promote computational thinking among people from all backgrounds.
Maeve Reilly
Research and communications coordinator
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois
(217) 244-7316