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.

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a $389,810 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify false information about the HPV vaccine and model its impact on risk perceptions.

Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes has organized and will be leading virtual versions of the Python Trainers Summit on April 23 and Python Education Summit on April 24.

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.

With schools resorting to virtual instruction during the pandemic, educators and families rely on online resources such as the National Park Service's Island of the Blue Dolphins website, which was developed by Sara L. Schwebel, iSchool professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, in partnership with the NPS. In this Q&A, Schwebel discusses how her research on the Island of the Blue Dolphins book led to her work with the NPS and future plans for the Books to Parks initiative.

Dawei Zhou and Yao Zhou, PhD students in computer science, will present the work of iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, at The Web Conference 2020. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 20-24, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

Emma Lipka joined the iSchool on April 6 as the recruitment and yield specialist. She comes to the School from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where she served as assistant director for marketing-admissions for graduate studies.

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