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Public servant, startup founder honored with iSchool alumni awards

The 2025 Information School Alumni Impact Award recipients represent two different eras, but they share a common thread: working on the frontiers of the internet to make information accessible to more people.

The iSchool Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes alumni who have made significant and exceptional contributions to the information field and their communities. This year’s honoree, Marcie Stone, earned her Master of Librarianship 1976 and spent her career in public service with the Army and the Department of Defense.

Marcie Stone
Marcie Stone

“When I started out, I was hand stamping things in my little Army library,” she said. “By the time I retired, 30 years later, everything was digital and the government structure for information had changed. It was an enormously exciting time to be in the information world.”

Stone spent several years in user services at the Pentagon Library and the last 20 years of her career with the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration mandated that all Executive Branch agencies create public-facing websites. Stone became adept at bringing together IT staff from the DTIC and representatives of the Secretary of Defense and military service offices that needed to build websites.

Stone’s team ultimately built about 100 websites. She later received the Department of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service and Career Service awards. She looks back fondly on the early days of the internet and the web, when the new technology was full of promise.

“It was frustrating sometimes and challenging all the time,” she said. “We were trying to make it easier for people to talk to the government and for the government to talk to the people. It was all quite altruistic.”

After her retirement from the Department of Defense in 2007, Stone and her husband, Dave, moved back to Seattle and became involved in the UW community. Marcie Stone has been a member of the iSchool’s MLIS Advisory Board since 2009. Both Marcie and Dave Stone have served on the UW Alumni Board of Trustees and on the Meany Center Advisory Board at different times.

Being an active alum has allowed Stone to keep employing her most valuable skill, connecting people with information and with one another.

“That is one of the things that has stuck with me, one of the librarian skills that I think is a life skill,” she said.

Nishit Bhasin
Nishit Bhasin

A 2024 graduate of the Master of Science in Information Management program, meanwhile, is the recipient of this year’s Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) Award, which honors recent graduates for their contributions to the information field. Nishit Bhasin has found early success as co-founder of a startup, Incskill, that is working toward a more accessible internet for people with disabilities. The company offers tools and services to help developers make websites and apps more usable for people with disabilities such as visual impairments.

Incskill began as a hackathon project and has quickly grown, aided by the iSchool’s iStartup Lab and funding from Techstars, an early-stage venture capital firm. Incskill has partnered with major corporations such as Google, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Bosch and GSMA, as well as national and international government agencies, including UNICEF, the Washington State Government, and the Government of India. Bhasin and co-founder Lakshya Garg, a current MSIM student, were listed among Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Social Impact earlier this year.

Bhasin, who came to Seattle for the MSIM program after completing his undergraduate studies in India, credits Assistant Professor Mike Teodorescu’s entrepreneurship class for helping turn an idea into a startup.

“In that class, I won an award for the project that I worked on the whole quarter. That really gave me confidence to have some conviction in my ideas. Maybe I'm thinking in the right manner,” he said.

Bhasin continued to check in with Teodorescu and Assistant Teaching Professor Jeremy Zartezky as the startup grew and sought seed funding. At the iSchool, he learned how to set up an LLC, how to get a patent, and the process of securing funding to start a company.

The MSIM program overall equipped Bhasin to develop an idea and turn it into something marketable, he said.

“It gave me confidence around how to approach a product and how to think from a user point of view,” he said. “In information management, we attended product management classes, data analytics, all of that. So it was a good mixture of everything that you need in the current market to build a technical product.”