Over the past three decades, I have conducted research in the areas of information seeking behavior, web searching behavior, human information interaction, search as learning, search for creativity, and information literacy. The overarching goal of my research is to examine the impact, value, and outcomes of information behavior and interaction, focusing on how information interaction improves human capabilities across work, school, and everyday life contexts. During the earlier stages of my career (1998-2014), my research centered on investigating how to help people find information they could trust, addressing two primary research questions: (1) how do people make judgments about information credibility in various contexts? (2) how do people’s credibility judgments influence the ways they seek, use, create, and share information? Since 2015, the focus of my research has shifted toward the concept of search as learning, conducting research on conceptualizing information searching as a learning process, assessing human learning in searching, designing learning-centric search systems, and supporting critical thinking and creativity in searching. I have addressed the following research questions: (1) how can we conceptualize the types of learning that search systems can foster, beyond acquiring and retaining knowledge?; (2) what design features and functionalities of the future search system will foster human learning and enhance creativity?; (3) what alternative evaluation measures can be developed to assess critical thinking and creativity process that may occur when interacting with search systems?

My research has not only produced about 90 publications but also led to participation in invited workshops such as the Dagstuhl Seminar on Search as Learning (2017), Dagstuhl Seminar on Evaluation Methodologies in Information Retrieval (2013), Symposium on Research Design, Paper Writing & Publishing in Information Science (2017), Workshop on Social and Collaborative Information Seeking (2015), Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2010), and MacArthur Foundation Workshop (2007).

I also have been invited to give research presentations internationally: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico (2023), Seoul National University in Korea (2023), Nankai University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and Nanjing University in China (Virtual 2021), University of British Columbia in Canada (2018), Université de Lille 3 Sciences Humaines et Sociales in France (2017), University of Tampere in Finland (2009), Lund University and University of Borås in Sweden (2009).