2023 Institute Participants

The 2023 Research Training Institute (RTI) is offered in a virtual format from May 2023 to June 2024. The institute provides high-quality advanced research methods curriculum and learning model, with mentoring and support for one year while participants complete their research projects. The 2023 RTI fellow candidates were chosen by a selective submission process with an emphasis on a desire to learn, enthusiasm for research, and the quality and promise of their proposed research projects.

Sarai Barrios, https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5015-6801, is a Clinical Research Medical Librarian at Shriners Hospital for Children Chicago, currently pursuing her MLIS degree from Dominican University, set to be completed in August 2023. With 15 years of experience in public libraries specializing in metadata, she serves as the SWAN Co-Chair of Acquisitions and Cataloging Users Group. Sarai has collaborated with the Law Library of Congress (LOC) on a project focusing on historical legal material metadata. Her research interests encompass healthcare clinical data, information literacy instructional design, born-digital preservation challenges, peer-to-peer learning, knowledge management, translation, and mobilization. Through her expertise and dedication, Sarai aims to advance library science, optimize information management, and empower individuals in their pursuit of knowledge.

Rebecca Benvie,  https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8499-6670, is a graduate student in the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program at St. Catherine University. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, with a minor in Longevity and Aging from St. Catherine University. During her undergraduate degree she completed research in genomics, including the annotating of new genomes in Drosophila (fruit flies). She currently works for her university's housing operations, and public safety departments. Her research interests include open access, and technological implementation.

Rachel Blackmon, https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0033-7744, obtained her MLIS in 2013 from Texas Woman’s University and her BA in 2009 from Texas Christian University in English/Environmental Science with a focus in Women’s Studies. Since then, she has served as head librarian in a secondary school for seven years before stepping out of that role to explore other avenues, specifically medical librarianship, which has led her to the RTI program. Her preferred topics of research include examining the potential biases and influencers of access to and availability of resources as they pertain to industrial farms and their overall impact on human health, as well as alternative methods of diagnoses and treatments within the field of psychology.

Vicky Leona Chung,   https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0893-0637, is a graduate student in the Master of Library and Information Science program in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University (Canada). She holds a Bachelor of Design in Environmental Design from OCAD University (Canada), with a decade of experience in professional project management, marketing, and design. Her research interests focus on healthcare environments, health information literacy, and the intersection of the physical world and emerging technologies.

Jordan Correia, AHIP,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1626-1649, is a graduate student at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information earning his PhD in Communication, Information, and Media. He earned his MLIS from Syracuse University. His research currently focuses on transgender health information behavior and evidence-based interventions that supports healthcare professionals in delivering transgender healthcare access, including how medical libraries can help with these interventions.

Deborah Farber, https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5459-1313, has been the Health Sciences Librarian at the California University of Science and Medicine since 2021. She provides evidence-based research instructional sessions and reference consultations for students working on research projects. She also works closely with a colleague to host the Annual Vendor and Resource Fair during the fall term. She presented a lightning talk about the planning process for the annual event at the 2022 MLA Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Deborah received her MLIS in 2005 from San Jose State University. Her RTI project will examine medical students’ critical appraisal skills during the first year.

Katie Pierce Farrier, https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8559-0223, is the Data Science Strategist for the Network of the National Library of Medicine Region 3 an outreach, training, and grants office for the National Library of Medicine. Region 3 is based out of the University of North Texas Health Science Center. They are responsible for the collecting, analyzing, and sharing of data about the engagement and impact of their regional office. They also work on creating educational content and programing on topics related to data science, open data, and health literacy. Katie graduated from the University of North Texas with a MIS specializing in health informatics. Her research interests include how medical libraries are addressing data management needs and supporting open data practices.

Mego Franks,  https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8074-5457, is a senior library assistant at the Coy C. Carpenter Library of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They provide reference and technical assistance to medical school faculty, students, and hospital staff and maintains special projects in assessment and scholarly communication. Mego’s research interests include information accessibility, metadata quality, and health equity.

Brandon Hall,  https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8627-2878, is pursuing his master’s in library and information Science through the University of Washington online and is scheduled to graduate in the Spring of 2024. He earned his bachelor’s in psychology & Spanish from Dartmouth College.  He has worked in libraries for over 15 years, split almost evenly between public and academic libraries.  He is currently the Circulation Supervisor at Nova Southeastern University’s Tampa Bay Regional Campus Library.  His research interests include marginalized communities, mindfulness, and medical humanities.

Laura Haygood, AHIP,  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4336-8203, is the Medical Reference Librarian at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University. She earned her MLIS at the University of Oklahoma. Her job responsibilities include instruction, research consultations, collection development, DOCLINE, evidence synthesis, and more. Laura is the treasurer of the South-Central Chapter (SCC) of MLA, the chair of the Accessibility and Disability Caucus of MLA, and she co-chairs SCC’s Early Career Librarians Initiative. Laura’s research interests include disability and accessibility within the medical librarian field.

Jackson Hoch,  https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5339-2521, is a Resident Evidence Synthesis Librarian at Virginia Tech University and an active liaison for human foods, nutrition, and exercise sciences. He earned his MLIS degree from Clarion University in December 2022 and prior to his current job he interned at VCU for approximately a year as a Research and Education Intern for the Health Sciences Library. This internship helped him cultivate a passion for research and teaching. In the health field, his interests encompass variables that contribute to One Health and how nutrition and exercise can help to prevent/reverse diseases/illnesses that are more prevalent in Western diets and living than in most other parts of the world. From a health libraries perspective, his research interests include models of effective management, models of effective engagement, faculty/staff retention strategies for libraries in rural settings or small college towns, and embedded librarianship in health/medical strategic plans/courses and syllabi.

Holly Hudson,  https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1249-0901, is a Regional Health Sciences Librarian and Instructor with the University of Illinois Chicago at their Rockford, IL campus. She works at the Crawford Library of the Health Sciences as a liaison librarian to the College of Medicine and has been in this position for almost a year. Previously, she worked in the financial industry for over a decade before I decided to change careers. She received my MLIS from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA in May of 2022 and came to Rockford shortly after graduation. Holly’s research interests include user needs and information seeking behavior for various populations.

Alla Iansavitchene,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5651-1024, is a Clinical Librarian on the Corporate Academics team at the London Health Sciences Centre, where she has been offering vital research services, notably supporting information retrieval for systematic reviews. She has co-authored many peer-reviewed publications with LHSC team members. To forge and nurture the library’s partnerships with other teams and to contribute to the LHSC strategic direction to drive an integrated clinical, teaching & research culture, she is participating in a brand-new six-month-long comprehensive training program, the "Discoveries in Leading Innovation" offered at LHSC. This avenue of work has been her shared passion for the last few months. Her research interests relate to donor relationship management (DRM) in the health sciences library field.

Heather Jaglowski,  https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4317-3993, is a graduate student currently pursuing an M.S. in Information Science with a concentration in Health Informatics/Librarianship. She holds a B.A. in Elementary Education and a M.A. in educational administration, and several certificates including ESL. Her research interests include exploring patients’ opinions of telehealth, how telehealth affects patient care, and patients’ views on how telehealth may widen their network of health care providers and how they seek health information.

Juliana Magro,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9679-9501, is the Education and Research Librarian at the NYU Health Sciences Library. She is the Content Director for Evidence-Based Medicine, part of the Foundational Clinical Skills course at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. In this role, she designs, coordinates, and teaches classes embedded in the curriculum, in addition to providing research support to students, faculty, and staff. Her research interests relate to EBM assessment and implementation of technology in education.

Hripsime Mantecon,  https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9487-5026, is a graduate student and is currently pursuing an M.S. in Information Science with a concentration in Health Informatics/Librarianship. She holds a B.S. in Business Finance, a M.A. in Linguistics, and a TESOL certificate and she hopes to continue for a PhD. Immersing herself in learning research methods through RTI will give her the confidence to carry out required research activity during my Ph.D. program. Her research interests involve exploring the information-seeking behaviors of parents who are looking to find mental health support for their young children; this could be especially interesting to study in minority communities.

Sarah Meyer,  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7861-561X, serves as a Health Science Librarian in the UF Health Science Center Libraries and is responsible for providing liaison services to the College of Dentistry and select departments in the College of Medicine. From 2017-20 she was appointed to serve as a data resource expert on an interdisciplinary Precision Public Health (PPH) workgroup with the University of Florida’s Clinical Translational Science Institute.  Her contributions to the workgroup were to curate an online portal of public health data providers, and to select variables, metadata, and index for a searchable data catalog of data sets to support precision public health researchers.

Janel Mittelstedt, https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9433-3597, is a recent graduate and virtual reference librarian at Rutgers University. Janel brings a whole-person perspective to her work with students and faculty across all five campuses, serving as a sounding board, co-explorer, teacher, navigator, and reverse engineer for ideas and systems of all kinds. Her graduate research focused on the social drivers of parental vaccination choices. Current research interests include LIS-informed approaches to research metadata management and aligning library services and emerging technologies with identified systemic needs. Janel’s RTI project will focus on assessing AI as a tool to improve academically disadvantaged biomedical students’ learning outcomes.

John Mokonyama, AHIP,   https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2770-664X,  is a Medical Librarian at Penn Medicine, Chester County Hospital in Pennsylvania. With over 20 years of library experience in teaching, research, and health science in academic settings, he is a Senior Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and the current chair of Nursing and Allied Health Resource Service Caucus DEI Task Force. John’s day-to-day activities include working on evidence-based research, literature searches, bibliographic instruction, collection development, instructional design, and programming. John received his Master of Science degree from Clarion University.  He holds two additional master’s degrees in Global Development Economics and Business Administration from Eastern University and a Healthcare Informatics certificate from Drexel University.  His research interests include leadership, collaboration, health information research, library trends, emerging technologies, scholarly communication, as well as learning about statistical tools for analyzing research data.

Nicole Montgomery, AHIP,  https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7879-2528, is a Clinical Information Specialist at CoxHealth Systems in Springfield, MO and provides a variety of services to support the informational needs of those making decisions that directly, or indirectly, influence patient care. She currently serves on the Nursing and Therapies Research Council, and recently her hospital earned Magnet status, allowing her to provide support to those performing research, and to conduct original research herself. Montgomery earned an MISLT from the University of Missouri – Columbia and has recently completed a graduate core certificate in Public Health at Missouri State University. Her research interests include understanding how virtual hospital libraries can effectively provide services and resources to support clinical and non-clinical staff.

Emrys Moreau,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0424-2045,  is a Reference and Instruction Librarian at the Schusterman Library at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa. In her role, she provides instruction, assists with research, supervises a team of graduate research assistants who staff the library’s service desks, and manages the library’s website. She has a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from the University of Oklahoma, a Master of Fine Arts degree from Naropa University, and undergraduate degrees in English and Art. Her current research interests include user experience, design thinking, website design, leadership, and online instruction.

Angela Murrell,  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9414-6163, is an Associate Librarian at University of Arizona Health Sciences Library. As a liaison to the College of Medicine -Tucson, she supports medical students, residents, fellows, faculty and staff with library resources, orientation and instruction, and evidence sysnthesis. Angela has spent much of her 20 year career in instruction, working with medical and graduate students. Her reseach interests include information and data literacy, research skills, DEI, and health humanities. For the RTI project she hopes to focus on the availablity and development of programs for teaching effective research skills to medical students engaged in scholarly projects.

Jennifer Muse,  https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8130-1643, is a graduate student in her second year of the Master of Library Science program at Emporia State University. She is seeking to combine her passion for teaching, a love of research, and her experience and interest in health and wellness. Jennifer is particularly interested in the health information needs of underrepresented and minoritized communities and is interested in pursuing a career in health sciences librarianship. Jennifer currently lives in Bloomington, IN where you’ll often find her outdoors either kayaking, hiking, or helping to build a tiny house.

Sangeeta Narang, PhD,  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2410-9783, is a Librarian Selection Grade at the Trauma Centre Library in JPNA Trauma Centre of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. She holds a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and MLIS from the University of Delhi. She has received M.Sc. in Computer Sciences from Kurukshetra University. She pursued her PhD, on health information literacy from IGNOU, New Delhi. She is also a recipient of the Commonwealth Fellowship, UK in 2012. With her career spanning over two and half decades, she has held numerous positions, performing a wide variety of library services and activities across four distinct campuses of the Institute. In her current role at the Trauma Centre, she plays a vital part in developing the resource center and providing reference and information support services to faculty, residents, and researchers of the Trauma Centre. Her research interests include scholarly communications, public health, social networks, emerging technologies, and health information research.

Christiana Princeton, https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5125-4930, obtained her Master of Library & Information Science degree from Wayne State University and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology. Her current research interests are service dogs, animal assisted therapy, and One Health (uniting human and veterinary medicine; integrating human, animal, and environmental health).

Melissa Rice,  https://orcid.org/0009-0005-6635-2898, is a graduate student and will receive her MLIS from the School of Information at the University of South Florida in May 2024. She has more than twenty years of experience in regulatory and standards information and certification, mainly in healthcare information technology and medical devices. She is a teaching assistant in the USF School of Information for two undergraduate courses: Introduction to Health Informatics and Electronic Health Records Fundamentals. Her research interests include health literacy, public health, and how information professionals can work with health care organizations and contribute to digital health technology.

Kelsey Sawyer, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9679-1024, is the Biomedical and Life Sciences Librarian at Brown University Library in Providence, RI. In her work, she supports basic and translational research, clinical faculty, research impact analysis, and collaborates on evidence synthesis projects as part of the library’s systematic review team. She earned a BA in English Literature and Art History from the University of Rhode Island, and an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. Prior to working at Brown, she was a research librarian for the U.S. Navy environmental planning program. Her RTI project will survey bibliometric methodologies used to infer authorship identity in the context of analyzing power and resource allocations in the research enterprise.

Prashant Shrivastava, PhD,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3976-2729, is senior librarian in main library for All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. He manages health knowledge resources development and users’ orientation for main and ancillary libraries of hospital. He is also academic counsellor in University of Delhi, India for BLISc & MLISc courses. He received a PhD in Library Science with topic research data management services and master’s in computer applications. He configured eShodhmanthan research data repository with support of Dataverse project, Harvard University, USA. He is also Co. Principal Investigator for the project, hosted under Central University of Haryana, India. He completed Research Data Management and Sharing Certificate from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries: Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

Danielle Westmark, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2498-2024, is an Education & Research Services Librarian and Head of Circulation Services at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). She is the library liaison to UNMC’s College of Allied Health Professions, College of Dentistry, and the Munroe Myer Institute (MMI). Her job responsibilities include providing supervising/circulation support, instruction and reference support, and systematic review/evidence synthesis support. Danielle received her Bachelor of Science in Education from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interests are in citation manager support/education and literature search services/systematic review support in health sciences libraries.

Linda Yang,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0922-9384, is a Librarian with Knowledge Resource Service at Alberta Health Services (AHS), based at Tom Baker Cancer Centre, which is located at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She works with a province-wide library team to support AHS staff, patients, and families with access to high-quality, evidence-based information resources. Prior to earning her Master of Information from the University of Toronto in 2020, Linda gained research experience working on multiple neuroscience projects between 2011 and 2017. Her current research interests include a focus on the intersection between health communication and cultural sensitivity.