iSchool PhD student Natã Barbosa and his advisor Associate Professor Yang Wang have received a $65,053 grant from Facebook for their project, "In-Situ Privacy Controls of Profiling and Ad-Targeting." The goal of the project is to design a privacy control framework that makes profiling and ad-targeting more transparent to ordinary Internet users.

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. Congratulations to this year's honorees!

MS/LIS students Michael Cummings and Josh Hackel have been selected as recipients of the 2019-2020 Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the University Library at the University of Illinois. Cummings works in the Scholarly Commons, providing service at the Scholarly Commons front desk and Main Library Information desk, updating web pages and maintaining social media, and providing GIS (Geographic Information Systems) support. Hackel holds two positions at the Library. At Grainger Engineering Library, Joshua covers a wide variety of responsibilities, including serving as a duty officer with supervisory responsibilities, providing reference and instruction, and supporting Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in the IDEA lab. He also works in Records and Management Services on a three-year grant project.

MS/LIS student Mia Adams' work with local and international nonprofits has earned her a Special Recognition in Graduate Student Leadership from the Graduate College at Illinois. Adams serves as director of development and board member for Three Spinners, a nonprofit organization serving refugees and immigrants in the Champaign-Urbana community.

The American Library Association's New Members Round Table (NMRT) Student Chapter of the Year Award (SCOTYA) Committee is pleased to announce the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the winner of the 2020 ALA Student Chapter of the Year Award. The committee also offers congratulations to the University of Southern California as this year’s runner-up.

Leep student Marilyn Creswell has been accepted into the Librarian-in-Residence Program at the Library of Congress. In addition to the experience she will gain working in the U.S. Copyright Office, Creswell will participate in enrichment assignments, receive professional mentoring, and take part in library-wide activities.

PhD student Clair Irwin (MS '16, CAS '18) has a personal connection to her research on the embodied information behaviors of people with diabetes.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

PhD student Courtney Richardson will be the keynote speaker for "Storytelling with Data," a webinar hosted by LACONI (Library Administrators Conference of Northern Illinois) on April 10. The webinar will teach participants how they can interpret and communicate library information to community stakeholders using persuasive storytelling and data visualization.

MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell has been selected to participate in the Cornell Summer School on Designing Technology for Social Impact. The program, which will be held June 15-19 at Cornell University, is designed to foster a strong cohort of underrepresented researchers working on topics related to the social impact of information technology.