About my research
I am a third-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. Specifically, my research focuses on online support groups for patients with chronic kidney disease. I am particularly interested in what motivates kidney patients to share personal health information in online support groups. I have also done research in the area of personal health information management and enabling information sharing in personal health records.
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 March 5th, 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)
- Safety and quality of online support groups for kidney transplant patients: using a framework developed by diabetes researchers, this study assesses the quality of information found in OSGs for transplant support. (Primary researcher)
- Ethical issues in freestanding dialysis clinics: Surveys and focus groups (Research assistant; PI: Mi-Kyung Song)
- Evaluation of written and online education materials for pre-dialysis patients (Research assistant, PI: Mi-Kyung Song)
- Assessing day-to-day management of congenital heart disease in young adults (Technical consultant; PI: Patricia Moreland)
- Flash card narrated videos by adolescents with chronic health conditions: a content analysis of YouTube videos (Research assistant; PI: Sheila Santacroce)
- Personal Health Records: An Assessment of Needs and Design Requirements (Assistant; PIs: Gary Marchionini and Barbara Wildemuth)