Bio

Jana Diesner is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Social Computing Lab. Her research foci are computational social science and human-centered data science. Jana works on methods from network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning / AI, and integrates them with theories from the social sciences and humanities. Her research has been supported by federal agencies from the U.S. and abroad, foundations, and the private sector. She also serves as the Director for Undergraduate Programs for her college. Jana earned her PhD at Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science. She is also passionate about creating and providing education and outreach to empower and enable traditionally underrepresented groups, especially women, to pursue careers in computing, and to advance the representation of women in tech.