Seniors win Applebaum Award for research into government materials

  • Student with short black curly hair wearing brown wire-rimmed glasses and a yellow, green, and white pattern shirt resembling an African textile sits smiling in front of doors with wooden panes of glass.
    Debbie A. Dada '22
  • Student with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing black long-sleeve sweater and a red, green, and black paisley scarf, stands next to leaded-glass windows in Sterling Exhibition Corridor. The leaded decoration in the window to her right shows a leaping stag.
    Joelle Besch '22
June 1, 2022

Two seniors receive the 2022 Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

Yale College seniors Joelle Besch and Debbie Dada were awarded the 2022 Applebaum Award. The award recognizes these students’ excellent use of government materials from the collection of Yale Library, a designated federal depository library. Each of these students made use of research findings in distinctive ways to support the arguments in their prizewinning essays.

Joelle Besch (Pierson College)

As the capstone project for her coursework in the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights, Besch created a database designed to analyze complaints made to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The goal of her project—“An Evaluation of the UN CEDAW Individual Complaints Mechanism”—was to determine how efficiently women’s claims of discrimination were being investigated and addressed. Jeremy Garritano, Director of Research Support and Outreach Programs, Marx Science and Social Science Library, explains that the committee was impressed to see that Besch selected documents that were critical to her argument and noted that she “added value” to them through her data extraction and analysis. Besch’s advisors on this project were Paul Linden-Retek, Schell Center Visiting Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, and James Silk, Binger Clinical Professor of Human Rights at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

Debbie A. Dada (Pierson College)

Dada was awarded the prize for her senior essay “Structural Violence & Small Victories: Political Epidemiology of HIV among MSM in Nigeria, 2000­–2010.” She wrote the essay for her dual-degree program in African Studies and the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. In selecting this essay as a prizewinner, the committee acknowledged the “breadth of documents utilized across multiple repositories (Canadian, U.S., UN, and others)” that Dada selected to examine “intersections of economic policy and public/health policy with health equity” related to HIV for MSM (men who have sex with men) within Nigeria. Dada’s advisor was Nana Osei Quarshie, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. Read Debbie Dada’s full essay here.

The students each received a $500 award and publication of their essays on EliScholar, the library’s publishing platform for Yale University researchers who wish to disseminate their work to a wide audience.  

In addition to Jeremy Garritano, the 2022 Applebaum Award Committee members were Barbara Etsy, Data Librarian; Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and Head of the Medical Historical Library; Cate Kellett, Catalog and Government Documents Librarian and Lecturer in Legal Research; Scott Matheson, Associate Law Librarian for Technical Services and Lecturer in Legal Research; Youn Noh, Research Information Management Librarian; and Jennifer Snow, Program Director for Instruction, Marx Library.

Read more about all Yale Library prizes.

By Deborah Cannarella