In recognition of their outstanding work, four UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) faculty members have received promotions effective July 1.

Assistant Professors Marijel (Maggie) Melo and Francesca Tripodi have been promoted to associate professors with tenure. Associate Professors Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi and Lukasz Mazur have been promoted to full professors.

Maggie Melo received the 2020 Deborah Barreau Award for Teaching Excellence from SILS and directs the Equity in the Making lab. She conducts research at the intersection of critical making and the development of equitable and inclusive STEM-rich learning spaces, such as makerspaces, in libraries. Her work has appeared in Libraries and the Academy, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers and Composition Online, among others.

Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and information scholar whose research examines the relationship between search engines, participatory platforms, politics, and society. She is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill and an affiliate (former postdoctoral scholar) at Data & Society Research Institute. She has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (April 10, 2019 and July 16, 2019), to explain how relevance is gamed to drive ideologically based queries and spread conspiratorial logic.  In addition to her research on search engines, Dr. Tripodi’s work documents how race and gender impact perceived notability – highlighting that cis-gender women are nearly twice as likely to be considered non-notable subjects than their cis-male peers. Along with her Co-PIs at MIT and Stanford, Dr. Tripodi received a National Science Foundation Accelerator Award in 2021 to study how people find information and build tools to enhance and enable search literacy.

Tripodi’s research is frequently captured by the mainstream press.  In December 2023, Dr. Tripodi was a featured guest on an episode of Meet the Press to discuss the dangers of online education tools like PragerU. Her work has also been highlighted on All Things Considered (NPR), the Financial Times, the Associated Press, and is the subject of her own contributions to Wired, Slate, and The Chronical of Higher Education.  In addition to these featured segments, Dr. Tripodi’s research is regularly cited by esteemed publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, TIME, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, and The Neiman Journalism Lab. In recognition of her impact, Dr. Tripodi received the Award for Impact and Excellence in 2023 from the Center for the Informed Public at the University of Washington.

Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi is the undergraduate program coordinator at SILS and, the recipient of both the Deborah Barreau Award for Teaching Excellence and the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.  He has spent his career researching the use and consequences of emergent digital technologies in shaping the future of work and organizations. His most recent work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the MIT Sloan Management Review.

In addition to his role at SILS, Lukasz Mazur is a full professor in the Radiation Oncology Department and director of the Division of Healthcare Engineering (DHE) at the UNC School of Medicine. He has received numerous awards for his work including a recent grant from Agency from Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to study physicians’ variability in treatment planning using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. His research interests include healthcare engineering management as it pertains to continuous quality and patient safety efforts in healthcare and human factor engineering with a focus on workload and individual performance during healthcare providers’ interactions with health information technology. His work has been published in leading journals including JAMIA, JAMA Oncology; JAMA Open, International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Physics, and Biology, and Ergonomics.

 

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