About my research

My name is Kaitlin Light Costello, and I am a fourth-year PhD student in information science at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My advisor is Dr. Barbara Wildemuth. I am funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research Interventions for Preventing and Managing Chronic Illness grant as a pre-doctoral fellow. My mentor on this project is Dr. Mi-Kyung Song.

I am broadly interested in the intersection of health informatics, online support, and privacy. I am particularly interested in what motivates patients to share personal health information online. Right now, my work focuses on patients with chronic kidney disease and their online behaviors. I have also done research in the area of personal health information management and enabling information sharing in personal health records.

My most recent project was presented as a poster at the Medicine 2.0 conference in Boston, MA on September 15, 2012: “We never would have found a kidney without Facebook” Looking for a kidney donor online: A grounded theory study.

I recently passed my comprehensive exams; if you’re interested, check out my comprehensive literature reviews on information behaviors of CKD patients, social support for health, privacy and disclosure of personal health information, and grounded theory.

I will be defending my dissertation proposal soon. Check out the draft, and let me know what you think.

Education

School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-SILS)
Ph.D., Information Science (In progress; began August 2009)

Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
M.S., Library and Information Science (December 2008)
Certificate of Special Collections (December 2008)

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
B.A., Film (May 2005)
Concentration in Poetry and Poetics

Current projects

Updated August 22nd, 2012.

  • Soliciting kidney donors online: an exploratory interview study with patients who are using or have successfully used social media to find an unrelated living kidney donor. (Primary researcher)
  • Assessing information content in online support groups for kidney patients (Primary researcher)
  • Evaluation of written and online education materials for pre-dialysis patients (Research assistant, PI: Mi-Kyung Song)