Profile

Dr. Naresh Agarwal PhD

Simmons University

Contact Details

Simmons University

Bio

Naresh Agarwal is a Professor and Director of the Information Science & Technology Concentration at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, Boston. He earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS)'s Department of Information Systems, School of Computing. Naresh's research area is information behavior and knowledge management — the way people look for information and the contextual factors that impact their choice of information sources. He seeks to understand and synthesize the apparent contradictions in this phenomenon and tries to reconcile multiple perspectives. His book 'Exploring Context in Information Behavior: Seeker, situation, surroundings, and shared identities' was published by Morgan & Claypool. Naresh also studies serendipitous information encountering and the causes and effects — both on the receiver and the sender — of information avoidance and non-response behaviors, especially by people who use smartphones and social media. He has been a keynote/invited speaker at workshops and conferences in different countries, including in the U.S., Japan, France, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has held various leadership positions at ASIS&T. He was a member of its Board of Directors, Co-Chaired its Annual Meeting in 2017, and was awarded the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award in 2012. He envisioned and initiated the South Asia Chapter of ASIS&T. As of 2020, he is advisor to the Chapter, Chair-elect of SIG Knowledge Management, and Poster Co-Chair for the ASIS&T 2020 Annual Meeting. Prior to entering the doctoral program at NUS, Naresh worked for six years in technology roles in the voice-over-IP, bioInformatics, and digital cinema industries. Among other things, Agarwal has been a debater and public speaker and likes to paint in watercolor and oil. In 2018, he started an initiative http://www.projectonenessworld.com to gather human stories through interviews to inspire other human stories. You can learn more about him at http://www.nareshagarwal.com