iSchools Research Grants 2025 Decision Announcement

The iSchools organization maintains an annual research fund of 20.000 USD for the benefit of its members. This year's grant topic has been "Information Science, Education and Research: Evolving Paradigms and Future Directions".  

We are delighted to announce the winners of this year's iSchools Research Grant application round. For the first time in the history of the grant, 77 projects applied for funding via the research grant. After a thoughtful reorganization last year, the grant is awarded for the first time under a specific theme and the target group was tailored even more precisely to doctoral students and early career faculty.

This comprehensive funding opportunity has been carefully designed to support groundbreaking and innovative research projects of early career faculty (up to 8 years after their dissertation) and PhD students that investigate the complex and dynamic intersection of information science, evolving educational technologies, and emerging research methodologies within our rapidly changing digital landscape. Applicants needed to have an affiliation at a member iSchool.

The maximum duration of the funding is one year. Each winning project additionally gets one free registration for the virtual part of the iConference 2027, as the winners will present their projects (preliminary) results at this iConference.

In a really close competition the Research Grant Committee has now selected the best four of the 77 proposals to be funded in 2025.

The iSchools organization would like to congratulate: 

Sarah Appedu

Syracuse University

Project: "Posthumanism and the Entanglements of Power in LIS Praxis"

4,500.00 USD

Yao Lyu

University of Michigan

Project: "A Study of Blind Job Seekers’ Use of Algorithmic Platforms for Employment Improvement"

4,500.00 USD

Allan Martell

Indiana University Bloomington

Project: "Remembering the Climate Crisis: Community Memory and Future Aspirations in Climate-Affected Urban Contexts"

4,500.00 USD

Di Wang

Renmin University of China

&

Misita Anwar

Swinburne University of Technology

Project: "Deconstructing AI Literacy to Boost Library and Information Science Education Transformation: The Asia-Pacific iSchools Focus"

4,500.00 USD

Congratulations to all winners!

The iSchools Organization would also like to honorably mention the following 4 finalists:

• Yuerong Hu (Indiana University) "Illuminating Online Book Discourse Dynamics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Backlash and Incentivized Content"

• Kunsang Choden Lama (University of Washington) "High Mountain Digital Futures: ‘For Someone Like Our Mothers, They Have No Choice’"

• Lesego Makhafola (University of Pretoria) "Reflections on the Responsible Use of AI-Powered Tools in Higher Education: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study"

• Subhasree Sengupta (Florida State University) "Human-AI collaboration in project-based learning for computing education"

The iSchools Organization would like to thank the iSchools Research Grant Reviewing Committee Members June Abbas (University of Oklahoma), Denice Adkins (University of Missouri), Waseem Afzal (Charles Sturt University), Dan Albertson (State University of New York at Buffalo), Periklis Andritsos (University of Toronto), Julia Bullard (The University of British Columbia), Nadia Caidi (University of Toronto), Jennifer Campbell-Meier (Victoria University of Wellington), Youngok Choi (University of Kentucky), Josep Cobarsi Morales (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Colleen Cook (McGill University), Andrew Cox (University of Sheffield), Peter Cruickshank (Edinburgh Napier University), Kimiz Dalkir (McGill University), Peter Darch (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Anind Dey (University of Washington), Archie Dick (University of Pretoria), Milena Dobreva (University of Strathclyde), Jennifer Douglas (The University of British Columbia), Greg Downey (University of Wisconsin), Yunfei Du (University of North Texas), Sanda Erdelez (Simmons University), Joanne Evans (Monash University), Fiorella Foscarini (University of Toronto), Jonathan Foster (University of Sheffield), Ina Fourie (University of Pretoria), Kasey Garrison (Charles Sturt University), Dion Goh (Nanyang Technological University), Koraljka Golub (Linnaeus University), Anne Goulding (Victoria University of Wellington), Kathleen Gray (The University of Melbourne), Annika Hinze (University of Waikato), Hamid R. Jamali (Charles Sturt University), Robert Jäschke (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Jeonghyun (Annie) Kim (University of North Texas), Emily Knox (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Maja Krtalic (Victoria University of Wellington), Erik Kwakkel (The University of British Columbia), Hakon Larsen (OSLOMET), Spencer Lilley (Victoria University of Wellington), Keith Marzullo (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Suvodeep Mazumdar (University of Sheffield), Eric Meyers (The University of British Columbia), Atsuyuki Morishima (University of Tsukuba), Javed Mostafa (University of Toronto), Chaoqun Ni (University of Wisconsin), David Nichols (University of Waikato), Gillian Oliver (Monash University), Vivien Petras (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Seamus Ross (University of Toronto), Laura Sbaffi (University of Sheffield), Elizabeth Shaffer (The University of British Columbia), Antonio Lucas Soares (University of Porto), Snjezana Stanarevic Katavic (Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek), Ana Cristina Vasconcelos (University of Sheffield), Rebekah Willett (University of Wisconsin), Kathy Wisser (Simmons University), Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet (Bar-Ilan University), Lihong Zhou (Wuhan University) for their detailed and extensive evaluation of the proposals.

The enormous interest in the iSchools Research Grant has shown us how important it is to support researchers at the beginning of their careers. Now, it is possible to donate to this funding pool on our website to support even more outstanding research projects by Ph.D. students and early-career researchers. 

The start of the iSchools Research Grants application period for 2026 will be announced in Spring 2026.