The School of Information Management is pleased to announce that the American Society of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has awarded the Thomson Reuters Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship to Interdisciplinary PhD candidate, and SIM alumna, Lori McCay-Peet. This annual scholarship is awarded based on originality and creativity and the potential significance of the research to the field of information science.

Lori will present her research proposal, “At the intersection: Investigating the qualities of the serendipitous digital environment and the serendipity-prone person,” at the ASIS&T 2012 annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland at the end of October.

Lori’s research explores the complex interactions between individuals and the digital environments in which they are immersed, such as websites, databases, and a variety of applications. Her research will contribute to knowledge of information behaviour, provide a source for design elements that may augment the capability of information systems to facilitate serendipity, and offer a tool for developers to assess the serendipitous nature of information systems.

Lori’s co-supervisor, Dr. Elaine Toms notes that she “has developed a solid research idea, a conceptual model to support it, and a preliminary pathway to follow. She has selected a risky topic — that of serendipity, a word that is bandied about on a daily basis, but which is also a phenomenon that has intellectual and economic consequences. She has a natural ability to identify a problem, voraciously consume the background research, and propose a solution or direction. To every project, she has brought a logical and analytical approach with novel and innovative ideas.”

Lori graduated from Dalhousie’s School of Information Management with the MLIS degree in 2008. Now a student in the Interdisciplinary PhD Program (Information Management and Computer Science), she is co-supervised by Dr. Elaine Toms (University of Sheffield) and Dr. Bertrum MacDonald (Dalhousie University). Lori holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral Fellowship and her research is supported by grants to Dr. Toms from the Graphics, Animation and New Media Network of Centres of Excellence (GRAND NCE), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Foundation of Innovation.