Pengyi Zhang: Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

It was a great honor to be selected to receive the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. I am sincerely grateful to Dr. Garfield and to Beta Phi Mu for providing this generous support. The fellowship has been mostly helpful to me in acquiring subjects and equipments for my on-going dissertation research, which investigates how users structure their conceptual space for news writing and business analysis tasks with the assistance of sensemaking tools. My research interest lies in the broad areas of interactive information retrieval, information behaviors and cognition, and user centered design and evaluation. I believe that information systems should not only help users find the information they are looking for, but also help them make sense of what they found for their tasks. I hope to further my research in sensemaking and to educate people about sensemaking skills and techniques after finishing my doctoral work at Maryland.