SIS Associate Professor Rachel Fleming-May was a public and academic librarian before she decided to pursue her doctorate in information sciences, and that experience has informed what she researches and how she teaches. In both, she “tends to focus on finding better ways to do the things I did as a practitioner with maybe not […]
Jill Grogg and Teddy Gray were in the same cohort and both graduated from SIS in 2001 and went their separate ways but into the same career path: academic librarianship. Several years later, their paths converged again when both departed their academic librarian positions and began working for LYRASIS. It’s a job that combines their […]
CCI doctoral student Jessica Barfield’s recent research with SIS Professor Dania Bilal looked at diversity and how that affected the way people interact with AI-powered voice digital assistants. Now, in collaboration with SIS Assistant Professor Jiangen He, she’s building on that research by taking similar principles and applying it to human-robot interaction. The two will […]
At her heart, Songhee Kim is an artist, and she’s found ways to incorporate that into her career path over the years. She earned an undergraduate degree in 3D animation and visual effects from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and went on to work for projects such as Disney Junior’s “Sophia the […]
Children’s picture book author and school librarian Alice Faye Duncan (’91) looks for those moments in history that define generations yet are not often discussed—and especially aren’t stories typically told via picture book. She was the first-ever picture book author to delve into the Memphis Sanitation Strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. […]
Like any good story, Stacey Smith’s (’14) has a thread of repeated themes; throughout her adult life she would be pulled back to her hometown of Memphis and she would consistently gravitate to libraries. The satisfying ending is that she went full circle and became the director of the library at her undergraduate alma mater, […]
For the past couple of years, SIS Associate Professor Vandana Singh has been increasingly sought after to speak about her research on women and marginalized people in software engineering—namely how those groups often face a toxic culture of inequity, exclusion, discrimination, and even outright bullying in their field. Singh recently won the highly competitive Google […]
In less than two years, recent MSIS graduate Gillian Kelly (’21) went from being unfulfilled at her job to grinning ear-to-ear whenever she talks about her new chosen profession in the field of information sciences. “I couldn’t really imagine a world in which I would be so happy in my work life. Work was always […]
Featured student: H.B. Fach Location: Lavergne, Tennessee Career Background: I’ve been in libraries in one form or another since 2008, ever since I started part-time at Lavergne Public Library. I went to Nashville Public Library after that, and then the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Currently I’m with HCA Healthcare in their Knowledge Management division. […]
After serving in different positions over several years in two Association of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Associate Professor Awa Zhu was recently elected to serve as the Deputy SIG Cabinet Director for ASIS&T. She will transition into the role at the end of the upcoming ASIS&T Annual Meeting, which is […]
