The Department of Information Science is pleased to announce that three faculty members are recipients of endowed professorships. Endowed Professorships provide recognition for faculty accomplishments and provide support for a professor’s teaching, research and/or service. Dr. Ana Cleveland has been renewed as the Sarah Law Kennerly Professor, Dr. Daniella Smith has received the Hazel Harvey Peace Endowed Professorship, and Dr. Junhua Ding has been selected for the Reinburg Professorship in Data Sciences.

"I congratulate the three outstanding professors on their performance and contributions to our students and the data and information profession," said Jiangping Chen, department chair. "Thank you to our generous donors for supporting the Department through the endowed professorships. The Department is committed to quality education and new knowledge creation for meeting the needs of the global information society."

Regents Professor, Ana Cleveland is a well-known educator and scholar in health librarianship and information science. She is the director of the Health Librarianship/Informatics program which is ranked #6 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. As a multi-awards winner nationally in health informatics, she has made tremendous contributions to the department and the field of information science through her teaching, leadership, and scholarship. Cleveland has received several awards from the Medical Library Association, including the Marcia C. Noyes Award in 2018, the highest honor that the association confers. Most recently, she was awarded the 2021 Distinguished Service Award by the Texas Library Association.

Cleveland’s research has focused on the areas of health information seeking of underserved populations, organization of health knowledge, competencies of health information professionals, health information in social media, and most recently, a research project with Drs. L. Hong and J. Philbrick on temporal and spatial modeling of COVID-19 Twitter data. 

 

Daniella Smith, the Hazel Harvey Peace Professorship recipient is a professor and the associate director of the Information Science Ph.D. program. She is a versatile researcher and educator in Library and Information Science (LIS), and serves in leadership positions in librarianship. She has made significant contributions to the department and LIS field since joining the faculty in 2010. Smith is a frequent presenter at conferences and has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in publications such as the Digital Information Review Series, JELIS, School Libraries Worldwide, and the Online Learning Journal (OLJ).

Smith's research interests include LIS education, social media behaviors, and the leadership development of school librarians. Her recent projects include aspects that explore youth information-seeking behaviors and STEM implementation in K-12 schools.

 

Junhua Ding, the recipient of the Reinburg Professorship in Data Sciences has been a professor in the department since 2018, and has since served as the director of the data science programs. He is an active researcher in data science and software engineering and has been well supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Security Agency on STEM education and Cybersecurity research. His contribution to the department’s data science programs on curriculum development and enrollment growth has been much appreciated.

Ding's current research interests lie in the area of data science, especially in intelligent legal systems, ranging from theory, to design, to implementation. He has actively collaborated with researchers in other disciplines, such as computer science, mechanical engineering, and biomedical engineering. Ding has worked as an engineer with major corporations and has published more than 90 peer reviewed research papers in data science and software engineering, journals and conference proceedings including iConference, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. His teaching interests are in data analytics, machine learning, and cybersecurity.
 

The Department wishes to acknowledge the generosity of the donors of each professorship. The Sarah Law Kennerly Professorship is the gift of UNT Emeritus Professor, Sarah Law Kennerly, who died in 2002. The Hazel Harvey Peace Professorship in Children's Library Services honors Hazel Harvey Peace, an African American educator, activist, and community leader in Fort Worth. The Reingburg Professorship in Data Sciences fund is the gift of Jesse Reinburg, a former graduate of the library science program, who passed away in September 2015.