About Us
Meet the CEDI team
Amelia Gibson, MLIS, PhD
Amelia Gibson is an Associate Professor at the College of Information Studies and the director of the CEDI Lab.
Dr. Gibson studies information marginalization, trust, and safety online, and in health and learning institutions (libraries and education), with a special focus on maternal health equity and disability justice. Her current work focuses on connections between personal assessments of danger/risk and marginalized people’s use of defensive information behaviors to protect self, family, and community from institutional harm.
Jasmine L. Garland McKinney, PhD, LCMHCA, NCC
Dr. Jasmine L. Garland McKinney (she/her) earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Sociology from North Carolina State University and a Master of Science (MS) in Counselor Education from East Carolina University – where she also earned a graduate certificate in Substance Abuse Counseling. Most recently, Dr. Garland McKinney earned a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Counseling and Counselor Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). Dr. Garland McKinney is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate (NC), Professional School Counselor (NC), and Nationally Certified Counselor. Dr. Garland McKinney’s clinical and scholarly efforts center on Black women’s experiences with maternal mental health, intergenerational trauma, and the relationship between Black mothers and daughters – her work has been supported by organizations including Reproductive Health Impact (formerly the National Birth Equity Collaborative), the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision, and the National Board for Certified Counselors. Dr. Garland McKinney is so excited to join the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, where she hopes to continue to expand research on Black women’s maternal health experiences. Dr. Garland McKinney is a proud wife and mother of two girls, Blake and Cooper.
Beth St. Jean, MLIS, PhD
Beth St. Jean is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies. She holds a PhD and an MS in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information. Beth teaches classes in the BSIS, MLIS, and PhD programs, particularly focusing on information behavior, research methods, consumer health informatics, and strategies for assisting people with their needs for information.
In her research, Beth aims to improve people’s long-term health outlooks by exploring the important interrelationships between their health-related information behaviors, their health literacy, their health-related self-efficacy, and their health behaviors. Her most current research focuses on consumer health information justice, aiming to identify the information-related causes of, and potential solutions to, health disparities. Beth and two of her colleagues at the iSchool, Ursula Gorham and Beth Bonsignore, just published a new undergraduate textbook: Understanding Human Information Behavior: When, How, and Why People Interact with Information.
Samuel DiBella
Samuel DiBella is a PhD student at the UMD College of Information Studies and a research assistant at the CEDI Lab. Sam holds an MSc in media studies from the London School of Economics and a BA in philosophy of language from New York University.
Sam DiBella’s research focuses on privacy, surveillance technology, the politics of encryption, and the ethics of information collection and publication. He studies how the increasing demand for data by governments and companies displaces the work of documentation onto vulnerable communities, in exchange for the promise of social services, as well as the social limitations of legal privacy rights in the United States.
Twanna Hodge
Twanna Hodge is a Ph.D. student in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Additionally, she is pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Students. She holds a BA in Humanities from the University of the Virgin Islands and a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Washington. She is a 2013 American Library Association (ALA) Spectrum Scholar and a 2022 ALA Spectrum Doctoral Fellow.
Twanna Hodge‘s research includes the mental health literacy and mental health information-seeking behavior and needs of BIPOC Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum (GLAM) employees and LIS students; mental health literacy and mental health information-seeking behavior of Afro-Caribbean immigrants; cultural humility in LIS education and librarianship; Afro-Caribbean immigrants’ ethnic identity formation; Afro-Caribbean GLAM workers experiences in US and the Caribbean; Afro-Caribbean students and professional experiences in LIS and the retention of Black students in LIS programs.
Jainaba Jawara
Jainaba Jawara is an incoming PhD student at the UMD College of Information Studies. Jainaba recently got her Bachelors in Informatics: Data Science from the University of Washington.
Jainaba aims to explore how inclusive data collection frameworks can be designed to address health inequities within low-resource and underserved populations. Her goal is to empower community members as active collaborators and architects of the ethical guidelines governing health data practices. With the support of the University of Maryland, she focuses on establishing community-centric health data ethics and initiating educational initiatives to enhance health data literacy. When utilizing their data for public policy or modeling, Jainaba aims to ensure that it authentically represents the community‘s perspective. Often, within the intricate processes of data analysis and policy creation, the personal narratives of individuals can be overshadowed or forgotten. Jainaba’s inclusive approach is designed to prevent this oversight, guaranteeing that each health data point genuinely mirrors the health needs, values, and concerns of the community it represents.
