Profiles of PhD Students and Alumni

Shawn is Toronto Public Library’s (TPL) Director, Policy, Planning & Performance Measurement where he is responsible for leading TPL’s strategic planning, policy, research, evaluation, privacy & risk, AI, data governance & analytics and performance measurement portfolios. Prior to this role, Shawn was the acting Director, Collections & Membership Services at TPL.

Proposal Title: Best Practices in Academic Libraries for Helping Neurodivergent (ID) Students in the United States of America and the United Kingdom

SJSU Supervisor: Dr. Michele Villagran

MMU Supervisor(s): Dr. Kirsty Fife, Jenny Rowley

Education:

BA Psychology: Clinical/Counseling, Minor, Women’s Studies, San Jose State University

MA Social Sciences, San Jose State University

Melissa I. Cardenas-Dow is a Social Sciences Librarian at Sacramento State University, responsible for the subject areas of psychology, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and counselor education. She is active with the California Faculty Association (CFA), the labor union representing teaching faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches in the California State University (CSU) system.

 Andrew Weiss has been a Digital Services Librarian at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) since 2011. His library work focuses primarily on scholarly communications, including institutional repository development, open access policy, copyright, and OA journal publishing. Current and past research interests include fake news and misinformation, mass digitization projects, digital libraries, and data privacy.

Tommy Vinh Bui is a librarian based out of Los Angeles. He was a Peace Corps volunteer working in education and community development serving in Central Asia from 2011-12 and was a 2018-19 Arts for LA Cultural Policy Fellow for the City of Inglewood. Along with being a 2015-16 American Library Association Spectrum Scholar, he is also a contributor to ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom writing about issues of censorship and public art. His work has also been published in Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs publications.

Melissa Fraser-Arnott is interested in the professional experiences of individuals and the community of library and information science graduates working in non-traditional libraries or non-library environments.  Her work experiences have included positions in government libraries, as a collection manager for a completely electronic open-access library collection, and as a Commercial Officer for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) in Ottawa, Canada.  Melissa graduated with an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario in 2006

Jennine’s doctoral work is guided by her desire to participate meaningfully in the scholarly discourse on the role and value of Caribbean academic libraries. She has proposed a case study approach on how academic libraries create value for their respective institutions through effective fulfillment of the needs of their diverse stakeholders.

Andrea Medina-Smith is a Data Librarian with the NIST Research Library and Museum. Andrea’s work at NIST includes working with researchers to document their data for publication, assessing and developing metadata schema for various projects and assigning persistent IDs to NIST resources.

Kim Morrison is a critical educator whose interests center on critical information literacy, student agency and the use of assets-based Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy in the development of student agency and academic achievement with college students. She teaches library research courses engaging her students lived experiences by exploring themes such as Tupac, rap and hip-hop and the images of black women in through literature, film and music.

Rebecca Bryant Penrose’s doctoral research grew out of a combination of interdisciplinary projects and student success efforts at California State University, Bakersfield, where she has been teaching since 1999. Her specific research interests include EdTech and information accessibility for at-risk and underperforming students, examining the ways academic libraries can use institutional research on their campuses to more effectively target library resources. Rebecca’s scholarship and conference presentations highlight best practices in teaching strategie

Pat Sandercock wants to make the user experience of finding information better. After more than 10 years working with ProQuest and Gale, Pat worked as an instructional and reference librarian. Watching how TVET (technical and vocational) students selected content from academic library databases for assignments became the inspiration for her studies. Understanding why students make the choices they do when engaging with library databases and discovery layers is the focus of her doctoral research.

Virginia Tucker is an associate professor at the School of Information, San Jose State University. Her career in information services began as head librarian at the Stanford University Physics Library. She was recruited by Dialog to their sci-tech client services and training group and eventually was promoted to manage client training programs worldwide. After many years working directly with end users and professional searchers, Virginia moved behind the scenes and worked as an information architect for commercial search engines.