Each year, the School recognizes a group of outstanding students for their achievement in academics as well as a number of attributes that contribute to professional success. The following student awards were presented at the School's Convocation ceremony on May 13, 2018.

Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the 10th Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in in Libraries International Conference (QQML 2018), which will be held on May 22-25 in Chania, Greece.

Throughout her racing career, Paralympian Amanda McGrory (MS '18) has had many fans cheering her on, but she considers her fans at the iSchool to be particularly special. At commencement ceremonies last weekend, she presented the iSchool with the Order of Ikkos, a medal given to Olympic and Paralympic medalists to pass on to organizations or people who have supported them on their journey.

Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will give a presentation at the Carle Cancer Center in Urbana on May 18. She will give the talk, "Learning Health Systems that Leverage Informatics and Communities of Practice."

Recent graduate Erica Zhang (MS '18) is heading to Arizona to start her new job as a junior taxonomist for Boeing. There she will work with the Information Services team to maintain metadata and controlled vocabularies to facilitate employee access to information.

During the 2018 Python Education Summit, held in conjunction with the PyCon 2018 conference, Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes will discuss how to help new Python learners be successful. PyCon, an annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language, will be held May 9-17 in Cleveland.

The iSchool is proud to announce the promotion of three faculty to associate professor with indefinite tenure: Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke, Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner, and Assistant Professor Emily Knox. Their new appointments will be effective August 16, 2018, pending final approval by the Board of Trustees.

Four iSchool alumni are among the twenty-five professionals selected to participate in the 2018-2019 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Leadership & Career Development Program (LCDP). These new fellows include Sandra Enimil (MS '09), Adebola Fabiku (MS '12), Myung-Ja Han (MS '06), and Thomas Padilla (MS '13). 

The first iSchool Corporate Showcase took place on April 24 at the University of Illinois Research Park. The event, which included a poster session and presentations, introduced employers to the strengths and expertise of information science professionals and celebrated the iSchool’s inaugural class of MS in information management (MS/IM) students. It attracted more than one hundred participants, including corporate partners and iSchool alumni, faculty, staff, and students. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will give the keynote address at the Northeast Ohio Regional Library System's Critical Conversations Mini-conference, Tolerance is Not Enough: Libraries Respond to Hate, which will be held on May 3 in Twinsburg, Ohio. The interactive event will focus on helping library staff assess their own cultural identities and biases and on looking at how these biases impact service.