Archive for category: People

Co-Director

Paul T. Jaeger, PhD, JD, is Professor, Diversity and Inclusion Officer, and Co-Director of the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program of the College of Information Studies and Co-Director of Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC) at the University of Maryland. He studies the impacts of law and policy on information access and behavior. He is the author of more than 190 journal articles and book chapters, and this is his nineteenth book. His research has been funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the American Library Association, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Science Foundation, among others. He is Co-Editor of Library Quarterly and the Editor of Advances in Librarianship. He is the founder of the annual Conference on Inclusion and Diversity in Library and Information Science (CIDLIS) and co-founder of the Disability Summit. In 2014, he received the Library Journal/ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award. 

Junior Fellow

Gagan Jindal conducts qualitative user research to assess the information behavior of people who have chronic illnesses and actionable strategies to optimize their access to information to help them manage their health. Her current research examines how people with chronic illnesses access information on community resources and the low-fidelity design for a crowdsourced health information system that could potentially serve as a repository of information on community resources to help this population manage their chronic illnesses. Prior to joining the iSchool, Gagan worked as a Research Analyst in the health informatics division at NORC at the University of Chicago in Bethesda, MD and as a Program Associate for the mobile health start-up, Vibrent Health, in Fairfax, VA. Gagan also holds a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Global and Community Health from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.

Senior Fellow

Dr. Jonathan Lazar is a professor in the College of Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Maryland. Dr. Lazar joined the iSchool in 2019, after 19 years as a professor of computer and information sciences at Towson University, where he served as director of the information systems program for 14 years. Dr. Lazar has authored or edited 12 books, including Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction (2nd edition, co-authored with Heidi Feng and Harry Hochheiser), Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy (co-authored with Dan Goldstein and Anne Taylor), Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology (co-edited with Michael Stein), Universal Usability: Designing Computer Interfaces for Diverse User Populations, and Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach. He has published over 140 refereed articles in journals, conference proceedings, and edited books, and has been granted two US patents for his work on accessible web-based security features for blind users. He frequently serves as an adviser to government agencies and regularly provides testimony at federal and state levels, and multiple US federal regulations cite his research publications. He has been on the executive Board of the Friends of the Maryland Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped since 2009, co-chair of Cambridge University Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology since 2012, and has been on the program committee of the ACM Conference on Accessible Computing (ASSETS) most years since 2006. Dr. Lazar is the associate director of the Trace Center and core faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.