Today Facebook announced the first group of students in the inaugural year of its Facebook Fellowship Program. The program supports Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year whose work "can help solve some of the biggest challenges facing the social web and Internet technology." UW iSchool Ph.D. student Parmit Chilana was one of five winners chosen out of many hundreds of applications from students at U.S. universities.

In a Facebook blog post about the winners, Greg Badros wrote "We started this program because the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions on topics ranging from cloud and social computing to Internet economics and machine learning. Identifying the five winners listed below was a difficult process, and in the end we looked for students that had a history of academic accomplishment, represented a diversity of research fields, and were working on topics that are directly applicable to the social web and Facebook." Chilana applied for a fellowship in order to apply her ideas for crowdsourcing help for web applications in a real-world setting.

In 2009 Chilana also won the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral award from her home country, Canada. Her primary research interests lie in understanding and supporting the collaborative work of software developers and user researchers, particularly as they make design decisions. She is interested in applying these findings in complex domains, such as biomedicine.

Chilana received her master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor's in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Chilana is currently advised by Amy Ko and Jacob O. Wobbrock at the UW iSchool.

For more information about Chilana's research and a list of her publications, please visit her Web site.