PhD Spotlight

PhD Student Jessica Barfield Named ASIS&T Emerging Scholar for AI Voice Research Done with Professor Dania Bilal

A collaboration between the College of Communication and Information PhD student and School of Information Sciences professor has resulted in innovative research that reaches into the future of AI-powered voice digital assistants and explores how it can be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. This research resulted in a co-authored paper and an award for the doctoral…
Paper by PhD Student Joseph Winberry & Associate Professor Devendra Potnis Wins ALISE Award

When Joseph Winberry was still a master’s student at SIS, he was a graduate teaching assistant to Associate Professor Devendra Potnis and also assisted in research. Both Potnis and Winberry are interested in social innovation, social justice, and the role information sciences can play in both of those areas. Winberry was helping with Potnis’s research…
MSIS Alum and Current CCI PhD Student Joseph Winberry (’19) Awarded Marva Rudolph Scholarship

When he was growing up, Joseph Winberry (’19) spent a lot of time around his grandparents and their friends in a retirement community – he found himself drawn to older people, and it stuck. It was just a fluke, he said, that he eventually was hired for a job at the Knoxville-Knox County Office on…
PhD Spotlight: Simmons University Assistant Professor Rebecca Davis Awarded IMLS Grant

Rebecca Davis recently received a grant from the Institute of Museums and Libraries that will continue in a similar vein of research she started as a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Davis is an assistant professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Sciences in Boston, and her research through…
Joseph Winberry (’19) to Co-Lead UT Webinar About Civic Engagement

SIS alumni and current CCI doctoral student Joseph Winberry (’19) will be co-leading in a university-wide webinar 2 p.m. Aug. 27 with the Office of Community Engagement and Outreach to discuss a LibGuide he wrote as a master’s student. Nicole Bryant of the OCEO said she came across Winberry’s LibGuide while searching UT resources about…
Katie Knight Pursues Big Data and Her Doctorate

Katie Knight has traveled from one end of the information sciences highway to the other – from public libraries to archives, and from archives to metadata. As part of her job as an assistant librarian at the New York School of Design, she cataloged and archived items requiring metadata tagging. It was then that she…
PhD Student Cassandra Huang Pursues Research to Make an Impact on Teenage Cyber-bullying

When Cassandra Huang graduated from high school in her home country of Taiwan, her General Scholastic Ability Test results gave her several options as to what she could pursue in college. For her, it came down to a choice between Chinese literature study and library information science; she chose the latter. “The LIS field has…
PhD Alum Danielle Pollock Pursues Her Love of Libraries, Research and Teaching

When Danielle Pollock was an undergraduate, she and a friend devised a plan to open an independent bookstore someday. The rise of online shopping and e-books stymied their dreams, but actually led to some of the research work that the UT PhD alum does today. “I always knew I was interested in libraries – not…
PhD Student Kevin Mallary Seeks to Help Higher Ed Students With Disabilities to Excel

University of Tennessee College of Communication and Information doctoral student Kevin Mallary was diving into information science during his undergraduate and master’s programs in communication at Wake Forest University before he even knew what information science was. At the time, he was focusing his research on website accessibility for users with disabilities. “When I go…
PhD Alum and SIS Lecturer Crystal Sherline Explores Usability, Digital Preservation

Crystal Sherline didn’t think she wanted to get a PhD; she was working as a library director of a small, rural library, and had already been through the rigorous PhD experience with a spouse. “I had a couple of patrons I was very close to, who were older and worldly. They told me, ‘You need…