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.

Lian Ruan (MS '90, PhD '11) has been selected as the recipient for the 2019 Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Distinguished Service Award. According to the announcement from CALA, "Dr. Ruan has been dedicated to Chinese-American librarianship throughout her career. She has committed to the growth and integrity of CALA as a strong ethnic professional association through her outstanding leadership [as Vice-President, President, and Executive Director], passionate activism, and professional involvement."

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.

Conservation organizations and foundations have invested billions to preserve natural resources and biodiversity across the globe, but the effectiveness of these investments over time is not always clear. A new multi-institutional project, led by a University of Illinois researcher and supported by a $550,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will trace key outcomes of $655 million in the foundation's global conservation investments made over 40 years.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a committee report examining computational reproducibility and replicability in science, with the goals of improving research rigor and transparency. The congressionally mandated report was authored by an ad hoc committee of national experts, including iSchool Associate Professor Victoria Stodden.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the establishment of its first endowed professorship, the Mildred M. Luther and Kathryn Luther Henderson Professorship in Preservation and Technical Services. The professorship was established through the generosity of Mildred Luther (1926-2017), a loyal Illinois employee and alumna with a special family connection to the School.

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.

In August 2019, the iSchool will welcome Sharon L. Comstock (PhD '12) as a senior lecturer and Inkyung Choi as a lecturer.

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

With support from the National Humanities Center, Professor Ted Underwood is examining patterns of human perspective throughout two centuries of literary history. The Center is a residential institute for advanced study in art history, classics, languages and literature, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. In addition to pursuing their own research and writing at the Center, fellows form seminars and study groups with cohorts holding shared research interests.