Dr. Dania Bilal receives the SIGUSE Outstanding Contribution to Information Behaviour Award

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the SIGUSE Outstanding Contribution to Information Behaviour Award, Dr. Dania Bilal.

Dr. Bilal is Professor at the School of Information Sciences (SIS), University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on children’s cognitive and affective information behavior in using and interacting with information retrieval systems, and is situated at the intersection of information retrieval, information behavior, and human-computer interaction. She is one of the foremost experts in our field on children’s and youth’s information seeking and retrieval, and is one of the top 1% most cited researchers worldwide in this area. She conducts her work with young and older children nationally and internationally in schools, libraries and computer lab settings.

Dr. Bilal has contributed significantly to the field of information behaviour for the past two decades with more than 70 publications. Her most highly cited work appeared in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T) in 2000 on “Children’s use of the Yahooligans! Web search engine: I. Cognitive, physical, and affective behaviors on fact-based search tasks.” She is co-editor of Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory (Information Today, Inc., 2007) with Diane Nahl, and New Directions in Children’s and Adolescents’ Information Behavior Research (Emerald Publishing, 2014) with Jamshid Beheshti. Information and Emotion was awarded the ASIS&T SIG USE Book-of-the-Year Award in 2008. In 2014 she won a Google Research Award with Jacek Gwizdka (University of Texas-Austin) for their research project titled, Child-friendly search engine results pages (SERPs): Towards better understanding of Google search results readability by children. She has been recognized with two Research Achievement Awards (2003, 2007) by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. A 2017 article published in Aslib Journal of Information Management put Dr. Bilal among the top 10 most influential researchers in information behavior worldwide. (Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69 (2),215-22, 2017).

Dr. Bilal teaches courses in information access and retrieval, human-computer interaction, Web mining, information systems design and implementation, and research methods. Recently, Dr. Bilal guided the development of the Youth Informatics Certificate program at the School of Information Science and developed a new Seminar in Youth Informatics course. In 2007 she was awarded the Association of Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) Teaching Excellence Award.
Dr. Bilal has served as mentor to doctoral students at both ASIS&T Annual Doctoral Colloquium and iConference Doctoral Colloquium.

Dr. Bilal has been active in SIGUSE and ASIS&T for many years. She served as Chair of SIGUSE in 2002-2003, and in 2003 the SIG was awarded “SIG-of-the-Year” by ASIS&T. Last year, Dr. Bilal was elected to the ASIS&T Board of Directors as Director-at-Large and appointed to ASIS&T 80th Anniversary Advisory Group, and to the Board’s International Relations Committee as liaison. She is the co-Chair of panels and workshops of this year’s annual meeting.