MS/IM student Jinal Mehta credits her iSchool experience with helping her develop the skills she needed for a successful internship with ROKMETRO, creator of the Safer Illinois app. Safer Illinois, the official COVID-19 app for the University of Illinois, provides pandemic resources to support community health and safety. Mehta found out about the internship at ROKMETRO, a startup at the University of Illinois Research Park, through her involvement in Illinois Business Consulting.

Sarah Park Dahlen (MS '09, PhD '09), iSchool research fellow and associate professor in the Master of Library and Information Science Program at St. Catherine University, will deliver the 2020 Gryphon Lecture on November 12. Sponsored annually by The Center for Children's Books (CCB), the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture.

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctoral candidate DeAnza Williams successfully defended her dissertation, "BlackBoyYALit: Seeing Black Boys in 21st Century Young Adult Literature," on November 5.

Shannon O'Rourke Kasali's involvement with libraries started before she arrived at Illinois for her MS/LIS degree. While working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she witnessed the lack of accessibility to books. In response, O'Rourke Kasali crowd-funded $27,000 to purchase 27,000 books, leading to the creation of Books for Congo. Since 2016, the organization has established 16 libraries in two provinces in the country, distributing over 56,000 books and training 30 librarians.

Teaching Associate Professor Judith Pintar has been selected to serve as project manager for the third and final year of Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (TDMH), a pilot program run by the Humanities Research Institute (HRI). The goal of the program, which is funded by the Investment for Growth Initiative of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research, is to help humanities faculty acquire the digital tools, computational methods, and technological expertise they need for their teaching and research.

Janice M. Del Negro (PhD '07) has been named an Illinois Library Luminary by the Illinois Library Association (ILA). This distinction honors individuals whose efforts have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries.

Anita Nikolich, director of research and technology innovation and research scientist, has been re-elected to a three-year term on the American Registry for Internet Numbering (ARIN) Advisory Council. ARIN is a nonprofit organization that manages Internet numbering resources and policy within Canada, the United States, and many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, and advances the Internet through informational outreach. ARIN's Advisory Council serves in an advisory capacity to the Board of Trustees on Internet number resource policy and related matters.

Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.

iSchool Affiliate Professor Clara M. Chu, director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs and Mortenson Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois, along with collaborators from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Texas at Austin, have received a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The $208,142 grant will fund the IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial intelligence (AI).