Soo Young Rieh

Brooke E. Sheldon Professor of Management and Leadership
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin

Soo Young Rieh is Brooke E. Sheldon Professor of Management and Leadership in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research areas include credibility assessment of online information, search as learning, supporting creativity in search, information literacy, and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in library settings. Her prior research has focused on conceptualizing searching as a learning process and evaluating human learning during web searching. Currently, her research revolves around fostering critical thinking and creativity within the search process, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of information search strategies and idea generation.

Her research contributions have garnered recognition, earning her over 10 research awards, including the ASIS&T Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior Research Award (2019), ACM CHIIR Best Paper Award (2023), ACM CHIIR Honorable Mention (2019), and Best JASIST Paper Award (2005, 2011).

Rieh has been actively engaged in various scholarly communities. She was the general co-chair of the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. She served as a Director-at-Large on the Board of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) and a member of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) Steering Committee. She currently serves as Associate Editor for Information and Learning Sciences and is a member of the Editorial Board for Library and Information Science Research. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), following a decade of service on its Editorial Board from 2014 to 2024. In 2022, her dedicated professional leadership and service in the field of information science was honored with ASIS&T Watson Davis Award for Service. She is a Distinguished Member of ASIS&T.

In the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, she served as Interim Dean (2024–26), Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (2023–24), and Associate Dean for Education (2019–23). Before joining the University of Texas at Austin, she was a tenured faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She previously worked as a Human Factors Research Engineer at the Excite@Home where she focused on designing and evaluating search engine user experiences. She received her Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Library Studies from Rutgers University, USA.

News

IMLS-funded LADDER Project

With Professors Kenneth R. Fleischmann and R. David Lankes, I received an IMLS grant (IMLS grant number RE-252381-OLS-22) to educate and mentor the next generation of Library and Information Science faculty specializing in artificial intelligence and data science. The LADDER project (Training Future Faculty in Library, AI, and Data Driven Education and Research) trains nine doctoral students in the University of Texas School of Information as LADDER Fellows, equipping them with the expertise to implement AI and data science applications in library settings. These fellows engage in collaborative research projects with iSchool faculty and librarians across public, school, and academic library environments. They receive mentorship and gain valuable teaching experience, focusing on how to develop, apply, and utilize AI in libraries in ways that are equitable, ethical, and effective.

Recent Publications

Singh, A., Guan, Z. & Rieh, S. Y. (2025). Enhancing critical thinking in generative AI search with metacognitive prompts. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1287

Choi, Y., Rieh, S. Y., Chavula, C. (2025). Think creatively outside the search box: Divergent and convergent thinking using creativity support search tools. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1243

Bilal, D., Chu, C. M., Rieh, S. Y., Khalique, N. (2025): Fueling conversations: AI education across the iSchools in the US and Canada. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1238

Chavula, C. Choi, Y. & Rieh, S. Y. (2024). Searching for creativity: How people search to generate new ideas. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 75, 438-453. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/asi.24857

Chavula, C., Choi, Y., & Rieh, S. Y. (2023). SearchIdea: An Idea Generation Tool to Support Creativity in Academic Search. In ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 161-171. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3576840.3578294.