Nine students were named winners of the 2019 Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creativity on April 17.

Every year the Booth Library Advisory Board sponsors the Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creativity. The Library Advisory Board, which is made up of faculty, staff and two students, judged the entries and picked the winners.

Graduate student award winners were in first place Obinna Ezeibekwe, an economics student from Nigeria, for his research titled “Stock Market Development and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Nigeria.”

In second place was Junnatun Naym, an MBA student from Bangladesh, for her research called “Impact of CEO Industry-Specific vs. General Managerial Experience on Firm Performance, Risk-Taking Behavior and CEO Compensation.”

Precious Allor, an economics student from Ghana, came in third for their research titled, “An Empirical Investigation into the Effect of Monetary Policy and Inflation on the Exchange Rate in Ghana.”

Godwin Gyimah, a history student from Ghana, received an honorable mention for “Revisiting the Women Factor in China’s Economy, 1918-1931 (Women in Cotton, Sex and Silk Industry).”

Undergraduate student awards were presented to Scott Boersma, a history major from Belvidere, who came in first place for “Tattooing Among American Sailors and Maritime Communities from 1860 to 1945.”

Rebecca Horan, a philosophy major from Bloomington, came in second place for “Public Health and Personal Choice: The Ethics of Vaccine Mandates and Parental Refusal in the United States.”

There was a third place tie between Abigail Emmert, a music education major from St. Joseph, for “Rhapsody in Blue: An Icon of Jazz and American Culture,” and Kathrine Gosnell, a history major from Mattoon, for “Southern Sympathies in Illinois as Expressed Through Nelson Versus the People.”

Jeonghyun Kim, a graphic design major from South Korea, received an honorable mention for her work titled “Wild.”

According to a press release, the student entry could have been a selection of written work, an art piece, exhibit, musical work, a documentary, a performance or another format, and it had to have been completed in the last 12 months.

The students also wrote up a short narrative detailing how they used Booth Library to help with their research.

Entries were judged based on excellence, creativity and the research portion they conducted.

Beth Heldebrandt said in a March 18 article of The Daily Eastern News that the reason behind the awards is to show students that they can use the many resources that the library has.

A digital copy of award entries will become part of the Library’s institutional repository, The Keep, found at http://thekeep.eiu.edu.

Analicia Haynes can be reached at 581-2812 or achaynes@eiu.edu.