Kent State University President Beverly Warren this week named School of Information (iSchool) Professor Yin Zhang, Ph.D., a recipient of the esteemed 2018 President’s Faculty Excellence Award.
The President's Faculty Excellence Award recognizes “exceptional performance by a faculty member which leads to the achievement of national or international recognition.”
“I am deeply honored to receive this award, and at the same time, I am very grateful, knowing that there are many other colleagues deserving of this recognition,” Zhang said.
A Highly-Relevant Information Sciences Scholar
Dr. Zhang is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of information science. During her 19 years as part of the iSchool, her research has spanned the areas of information creation and diffusion, information-seeking behavior, database system design and ebook reading behavior.
Just one example of her recent research efforts focuses on the timely topic of information seeking and sharing through the use of social media including Twitter, social question and answer websites (e.g. Yahoo Answers, Baidu Knows and WebMD) and scholarly social networking websites like ResearchGate.
In 2013, Zhang’s award-winning paper detailing the use of the Internet for survey research became one of the most downloaded papers of the year published by the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
In addition to this latest honor, Dr. Zhang has been in the past awarded the prestigious Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition twice by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE).
Dr. Zhang has also received over $1 million in external grant funding to support her prolific output in over 40 research publications and over 70 presentations.
A Supportive Research and Teaching Environment
Zhang applauded the support she has received from Kent State University and the iSchool. “I have been constantly inspired and amazed by the great work and creativity of my colleagues,” she said.
She was nominated for the award by iSchool Director, Dr. Kendra Albright (along with previous nominations by colleagues Dr. Marcia Zeng and Dr. Athena Salaba), and the nomination was supported by College of Communication and Information Dean Amy Reynolds and University Provost Todd Diacon.
Dr. Alright spoke highly of Dr. Zhang’s success in both the areas of both teaching and research. “Dr. Zhang is an excellent scholar and teacher, and a wonderful colleague and mentor to the entire School,” Albright said. In support of her commitment to her students, Zhang has been named both Teaching Scholar and Moulton Scholar by Kent State in the past.
Zhang was one of 74 faculty members nominated for the 2018 Faculty Excellence Award, of which only 13 were selected as recipients.
Zhang obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has been a faculty member at Kent State University since 1999.
Read more about Dr. Zhang’s accomplishments
Learn more about Kent State University’s School of Information (iSchool)