Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Three Libraries and School of Information Studies Faculty Receive Promotions

April 20th, 2023

Congratulations to the three Libraries and School of Information Studies faculty whose promotions were recently approved by the Purdue University Board of Trustees, effective August 14, 2023.

Ningning Nicole Kong: Professor 

Dr. Ningning Nicole Kong joined the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies as an Assistant Professor and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist in Fall 2012 and received her promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in 2018. Dr. Kong’s work at Purdue has focused on applying geospatial information and technology across various disciplines and user groups, including developing multi-disciplinary learning programs, enabling easy access to geospatial information, and leading the spatial analysis/visualization portion of research projects. Within Purdue University, she has created and led the Graduate Certificate Program in Geospatial Information Science (GIS) with a team of faculty and staff from 7 colleges and 2 academic units at Purdue. She has been serving as the director for the IndianaView Program, a state chapter for the national program AmericaView, for four years. She has successfully led and continued to grow the IndianaView Consortium, which now includes 16 institutions across Indiana with almost 70 faculty and staff members affiliated. Through her leadership, the Libraries has been designated as one of the first nine participating institutions of Esri Innovation Program (EIP) across the nation. In 2020, Dr. Kong was recognized as an internationally leading GIS expert by Esri with a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award. She has served as the current Associate Dean for Research in Libraries since 2021.

What’s next for Kong at Purdue Libraries? “I will continue to promote and integrate geospatial information into interdisciplinary research and teaching. The GIS certificate program has been fruitful and we have graduated students from agriculture, engineering, science, business, and anthropology. I hope to continuously grow student enrollment and expand to more disciplines. In the Associate Dean for Research role, I hope to continue to promote and advocate Research Excellence Areas in Libraries (REALs) under the new challenges, including research data management, mis/dis/mal information, knowledge synthesis, generative AI in connection with information literacy, etc.”

Jane Kinkus Yatcilla: Professor

Professor Jane Kinkus Yatcilla’s career at Purdue Libraries dates back to 2001. Her areas of research interest include bibliometric analysis, citation context analysis, and evidence synthesis. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Anthrozoos, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Journal of the Medical Library Association, and Journal of Library Administration. In her own words, Yatcilla describes her career: “Academic librarianship has changed drastically since I entered the field in the early ‘90s. I have had the opportunity to do things as a Purdue Libraries faculty member that I probably couldn’t have envisioned back then, including designing and teaching credit courses, participating as a full member on other faculty’s research teams, and developing my own research agenda. In recent years my research has focused on using bibliometric techniques to better understand multidisciplinary fields like human-animal interactions (HAI) research, as well as collaborating on systematic reviews with colleagues from across campus (and around the world), both of which have been very rewarding.”

What’s next for Yatcilla at Purdue Libraries? “Going forward, I plan to continue my work supporting human-animal interactions research, including the HABRI Central web platform for HAI research materials, and following up on the numerous HAI-related research questions on my to-do list. And I expect that evidence synthesis projects will remain a key element in my research collaborations across campus. I also look forward to focusing on teaching, especially the Libraries’ systematic review course and my information skills course for new graduate students in the health sciences. Some of the most gratifying moments of my career have come through getting to know Purdue graduate students and helping them in tangible ways with these courses.”

Matthew N. Hannah: Associate Professor

Dr. Matthew N. Hannah joined the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies in 2018. Dr. Hannah’s research focuses on digital humanities, information studies and literacies, and online conspiracy theories, and his writing has most recently appeared in Social Media + Society, First Monday, The Journal of Magazine Media, and Collection Management, among others. In addition, he has a chapter forthcoming in the field-defining Debates in the Digital Humanities in 2023. Dr. Hannah’s teaching focuses on exploring challenging problems at the intersection of technology and culture, and he’s offered innovative courses at Purdue such as American Conspiracy Theories, Diplomacy Lab, #Anonymous, Digital Humanities Foundations, and Dead Media. Dr. Hannah also launched the first certificate offering in the School of Information Studies with the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate. Alongside Associate Professor Bethany McGowan, Dr. Hannah offered the Diplomacy Lab project, which featured a collaboration between Purdue students and officials in the U.S. Department of State on a global information challenge. Before coming to Purdue, he was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in Public and Digital Humanities at the University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and he received his PhD in English from the University of Oregon.

What’s next for Hannah at Purdue Libraries? “I plan to continue my research into challenging information dynamics surrounding social media and the internet, focusing particularly on the problematic of online conspiracy theories. Future projects will develop opportunities to collaborate with Purdue’s talented students to develop “de-radicalization” toolkits, providing resources for individuals to help family and friends escape from conspiracism, and I hope to develop such resources for state and local governments, to ensure that Hoosiers have a resource for healthy information practices and anti-conspiratorial thinking.”