The University of Texas at Austin iSchool is delighted to announce that Dr. Soo Young Rieh has accepted the position as full professor and Associate Dean for Education beginning August 1st, 2019. Dr. Rieh will succeed Philip Doty as the iSchool's new Associate Dean for Education. Dr. Rieh and a new Associate Dean for Research, also starting this fall, are both new senior administrative staff and faculty positions created by Dean Eric Meyer in the fall of 2018. "Dr. Rieh is an exceptionalscholar and an administrator with a proven track record in developing innovative cross-disciplinary teaching programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels; we are thrilled she will be joining us," said Dean Meyer announcing Dr. Rieh's appointment.
Soo Young Rieh is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where she served as Director of the Master of Science in Information (MSI) Program from 2014 to 2017. Her research areas include human information behavior, web searching behavior, human information interaction, and information literacy. She has made contributions to the field of information science by initiating and conducting research pursuing two distinct research agendas: credibility assessment in information seeking and searching as learning. She has examined how to help people find credible information in online environments and how people’s credibility assessments influence their information seeking strategies. In recent years, herresearch has focused on conceptualizing searching as a learning process through the concept of comprehensive search. She also has conducted research on assessing learning outcomes in web searching. Her long-term research goal is to design learning-centric search systems that facilitate human learning and support critical thinking and creativity by expanding searchers’ use of information-literate actions such as evaluating, comparing, and differentiating the value of information across multiple sources. Her research has been funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the MacArthur Foundation, and Brainly, Inc.
She is a recipient of several research awards, including Best JASIST Paper Award (2005, 2011), ACM SIGIR CHIIR Honorable Mention (2019), ASIS&T Best Conference Paper Award (2010), ASIS&T SIGUSE Award for Best Information Behavior Conference Paper (2007, 2015), and Eugene Garfield-ALISE Doctoral Dissertation Award (2002). Before joining the Michigan faculty in 2002, Rieh was Human Factors Research Engineer at the Excite@Home Search and Directory Group. She received her Ph.D. in information science from Rutgers University.
More information at https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/news/dr-soo-young-rieh-named-new-associate-dean-education