Elaine Toms is currently Professor of Information Innovation & Management, Management School, University of Sheffield, UK. She previously held posts at the iSchool, University of Sheffield; the Faculty of Management, and School of Information Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada; and the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, also in Canada. She was the first information scientist to be appointed to a Canada Research Chair. Over the course of her career, she has held multiple administration roles (e.g., Director of Teaching Quality & Enhancement, and of Research); been actively engaged in professional associations including ASIST (serving on the Board of Directors); has served as program chair for multiple conferences (e.g., ASIST, Hypertext, and JCDL); and currently serves on the editorial board of IPM and is an associate editor of JASIST.
She completed her PhD at Western University (Canada) from which she went on to examine multiple facets of the information interaction problem from interface issues to interruptions and task, with a particular focus on evaluation. Her work has been funded by multiple groups on both sides of the pond (e.g., both the science and social science research councils in Canada, OCLC, Heritage Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Horizon 2020). She has been an investigator with multiple research networks (e.g., NECTAR, Network for Effective Collaboration Through Advanced Research; PROMISE (Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation).