Background
I’ve been a server, a delivery driver, an astronomy major (til the math got hard), a freelance journalist, a newspaper article summarizer, a database builder, a librarian, moderator of a social Q&A site and a professor. What all of those things have in common is connecting diverse people, ideas and information. Making non-obvious connections is essential to communication and understanding, and every discipline, industry and community needs people who can help information flow.
Education
- PhD, Library and Information Science, University of California-Los Angeles, 2004
- MLISc, Library and Information Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 1998
- BA, Sociology, University of California-Berkeley, 1987
Specializations
Interdisciplinary collaborations; online communities; and scientometrics.
Research
My research interests include how people integrate diverse types of knowledge in interdisciplinary scientific collaborations, social Q&A communities and informal educational resources. I’ve worked with the NASA Astrobiology Institute to catalyze interdisciplinary research via sociotechnical document analysis, and spent my sabbatical as a Visiting Researcher at NASA Ames Research Center to analyze and visualize changes to the astrobiology research literature over time. My research addresses how people without a shared context, be they scientists from different disciplines or strangers on the web, evaluate, communicate and reconcile often-conflicting senses of information.