Advancing knowledge and practice wherever people interact with information and technology

Incoming 5th Year MIDS student Christina Carr was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Sharon X. Lin & Andrew R. Bullen Graduate Fellowship in Data Science for the 2020–21 academic year. The award supports students in the Master’s of Information and Data Science program who show a commitment to gender equity within the program. 

Passionate about math and science from an early age, Sharon was raised by a single mother who encouraged her daughters to value education, which was one of the reasons the couple decided to fund a fellowship to benefit gender equity in the MIDS program. “Female representation, encouraging minorities to go into STEM, helping people from lower-income brackets — I want all of these people to thrive in the STEM environment!” Lin said.

The internet was built on the idea of free-flowing information and open discourse. In reality, though, online tools are used as weapons to harass, hurt, and demean others, stifling voices and viewpoints. 

Assistant Professor Niloufar Salehi has an idea that might help address online harm: she’d like to see if the restorative justice process can be implemented successfully in online communities, and the National Science Foundation has awarded her a Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant to study just that.