Three alumni--an associate professor and two lecturers--are among several instructional faculty joining the School of Information in fall 2020.

Ricardo Punzalan joined UMSI as an associate professor in January and will be teaching his first UMSI classes this fall. His scholarship is in the area of archives and digital curation, specifically the access and use of digitized anthropological archives and ethnographic data of academic and community-based researchers. He holds a PhD in Information from UMSI and previously taught on the faculty of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies and the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, where he co-directed the University’s Museum Scholarship and Material Culture graduate program. He will be teaching SI 632: Appraisal of Archives in the fall semester.

Julie Hui joins the faculty this fall as an assistant professor, moving to the tenure track from her position as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work looks at how self-directed professionals leverage socio-technical systems like crowdfunding platforms, social media networks and makerspaces, to learn skills and perform their work. Hui holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University. She will be teaching SI 388: The H in HCI this fall.

Irene Pasquetto joins UMSI as an assistant professor this fall. Before joining UMSI, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where she researched online mis- and disinformation. As a research assistant at UCLA, Pasquetto investigated the sociotechnical challenges related to the open circulation and reuse of knowledge products, and in particular of scientific data and software. She holds a PhD in information studies from UCLA.

The following four instructors are joining UMSI as new Lecturers III this fall.

Melissa Chalmers holds a PhD from UMSI, where her research focused on the invisible work and workers involved in large-scale digitization. Previously she worked as a graduate student instructor for the Master of Applied Data Science degree program. Melissa will be teaching SIADS 503: Data Science Ethics this fall.

Anthea Josias earned her PhD at UMSI, where her research focused on political transformation in post-1990 South Africa. Josias also worked as a graduate staff assistant/graduate student instructor in the IMLS-funded “Engaging Communities” project with Professor Elizabeth Yakel. She will be teaching SI 501: Contextual Inquiry this fall.

Aasakiran “Bobby” Madamanchi comes to UMSI from Purdue University, where he worked as an independent postdoctoral associate in the future work and learning strategic impact area. Madamanchi holds a PhD in cancer biology from Vanderbilt University. He will be teaching SI 507: Intermediate Programming and SIADS 521: Visual Exploration of Data this fall.

Yumou Wei holds a Master of Science degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan, where he served as a graduate student instructor with UMSI and with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the College of Engineering. Wei will be teaching several classes this fall in the Master of Applied Data Science degree program, including Data Mining I and II and SIADS 655: Applied Natural Language Processing.