I bring a unique combination of expertise that shapes my work at Fondren Library: communication, information science, and public health, with my PhD in Communication, Master’s in Information Sciences, and my postdoctoral research in public health, primarily focusing on tobacco control. Through these experiences, I developed skills to work with a wide variety of research data: social media, digital archives of internal corporate communications, and qualitative interviews, to name a few.
At Fondren Library, I developed an approach of critical data intelligence – the capacity to evaluate and interrogate information at scale – by bringing all my areas of expertise together: domain knowledge of how misinformation operates and is perceived, technical fluency to work with data (Python, text analysis), pedagogical skill in teaching critical source evaluation, and the ability to ask hard questions of AI-generated outputs.
This convergence positions me as a resource for the campus community as it navigates generative AI in research, teaching, and learning. I treat AI not as a novelty but as a broader information credibility problem – the kind of problem my research career has always been about – and help faculty, students, and researchers work through how to evaluate AI-generated content for scholarly use, how generative AI is re-shaping the information landscape, and what responsible and methodologically sound AI use looks like in practice. I am also engaged in the library's broader efforts to build responsible, pedagogically grounded AI support, translating fast-moving developments in generative AI into practical guidance the research community can actually use.
Framing my work around research problems rather than particular tools, I teach library workshops on programming, text analysis, critical information evaluation, and fluency in AI, and draw on my interdisciplinary experience in research, grant writing, and publication to help scholars find, analyze, and responsibly interpret archival and social media data, with AI-informed guidance woven throughout.