Doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Tutteli to Japan': a Case Study of Spontaneous Collaboration in Disaster Response," on May 17.

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 12, 2019.

In her work at a women's prison in Illinois, MS/LIS student Christinna Swearingen noticed that while a lot of the prisoners love books, many of them struggle to read. Her response to this problem was to create a Prison Book Club to engage readers at all levels of ability.

Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics has selected PhD student Jessica Cheng as a LEADS-4-NDP 2018-2019 Fellow. LEADS-4-NDP, the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform program, is part of the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

In Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 540), students learn advanced techniques of business research through hands-on experience with real-world clients. This semester, a team of students has been working with entrepreneur Douglass Lee, founder of the startup OneSoftDigm (OSD) and a senior in business at the University of Illinois.

MS/LIS student Monica Hoh has been awarded a fellowship from the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). Of the 90 students and early-career professionals in publishing, librarianship, and information science who applied for the fellowship, twelve were selected. According to the SSP, this year's recipients were chosen based on their high level of engagement in their fields and represent a diverse range of skills in scholarly publishing and librarianship.

Cesar Ortega fell in love with libraries at the age of thirteen, when he joined the Aurora (IL) Public Library's Teen Advisory Board. The board was composed of a group of teens from around the city who created programs for the library. 

After she graduates next month, master's student Jenny Bruxvoort will move to Oregon to work as a research and instruction librarian at George Fox University. The job will combine her interest in academic libraries and her desire to support students.

Master's student Sharon Han has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Student Writing Award sponsored by Ex Libris Group and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) for her paper titled "Weathering the Twitter Storm: Early Uses of Social Media as a Disaster Response Tool for Public Libraries During Hurricane Sandy."