About Us

Meet the CEDI team

Amelia Gibson, PhD

Amelia Gibson, PhD

Associate Professor

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.

Samuel DiBella

Samuel DiBella

PhD Student

Samuel DiBella is a PhD student at the UMD College of Information Studies and a research assistant at the CEDI Lab.

Twanna Hodge

Twanna Hodge

PhD Student

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.

Beth St. Jean

Beth St. Jean

Associate Professor

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.