This fall, the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) will welcome back Diane Kelly as the new Wilson Distinguished Professor. This tenured, full professor appointment honors the legacy of Dr. Wilson, the first librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founder of SILS. As the Wilson Distinguished Professor, Kelly will conduct research, teach and advise students, contribute to the profession, and share her expertise with both graduate and undergraduate students.

Diane Kelly is currently the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at the University of Tennessee Knoxville where she leads academic personnel services, including hiring, review, tenure and promotion of all faculty, and faculty development and advancement. Prior to this, she was Director and Professor in the School of Information Sciences at UTK, where she guided the school through several significant successes including a 136% enrollment increase in the MSIS program, the creation of a new bachelor’s degree in information sciences, and entry into US News and World Report’s Top 10 programs in information and library science.

Before joining UTK, she was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she enjoyed teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and contributing to service.

Kelly has received several awards for her research and teaching, including induction into the ACM SIGIR Academy, the ASIST Research Award, British Computer Society’s IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award, Best JASIST Paper of the Decade (2000s) and the ASIST/Thomson Reuters Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. Kelly served as chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), co-editor-in-chief of Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, and as a member of the ALA Committee on Accreditation. Kelly received a B.A. from the University of Alabama, and a M.L.S. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She enjoys reading, gardening, and spending time with her dog.

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