Biography

Soo Young Rieh is Professor and Associate Dean for Education in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. 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, her research 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.

Rieh was elected as a Director-at-large to the Board of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in 2017. She has been a member of the Steering Committee for ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) since 2018. She is an Associate Editor for a new journal, Information and Learning Sciences published by Emerald. She also has served as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and Library and Information Science Research. She co-edited the Journal of Information Science Special Issue on Recent Advances on Searching as Learning.

Rieh 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 faculty of School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, she spent 17 years as a faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where she also served as Director of the Master of Science in Information (MSI) Program from 2014 to 2017. Rieh was Human Factors Research Engineer at the Excite@Home Search and Directory Group from 2000 to 2001. She received her Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Library Studies from Rutgers University in 2000.

Degrees

Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Library Studies, Rutgers University