Kristen Matteucci received the 2016 award for master’s students and will receive her degree this summer. Continuing with her interest in equitable information access, she has focused her attention on the health sciences and is currently a reference intern at both the Biomedical Library of the University of Pennsylvania and at the Collingswood Public Library, following completion of field experience at the Community Health and Literacy Center/South Philadelphia Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Jordan Eschler, who received the 2014 Peters Fellowship for doctoral students, used the award to design and execute research that she then presented at conferences. The award supported the research work itself, as well as travel to the events. One of her papers detailed a preliminary illness phase-based information behavior model for young adult cancer survivors, which will serve as the basis for her dissertation.
Olivia Dorsey was the recipient of the master’s level fellowship in 2014; her master’s project, “Visualizing Police Brutality,” focused on visualizing data relating to incidents of police brutality against unarmed African Americans from 1979-2014. After graduation, Dorsey served as Technology Specialist within the IT Department of the Mountain Area Health Education Center in Asheville, NC.
Jessica A. Koepfler received the Peters fellowship in 2010, completed her degree in 2014, and then served as Managing Director at Intuitive Company, a user-centered research, design, and development firm. Koepfler commented, “The fellowship provided a source of funding that allowed me to commit myself to a ‘fringe’ topic like the study of values within the context of homelessness… The award … put a spotlight on me early on in my program, which had the snowball effect of people noticing me… I am truly grateful for the fellowship and credit it with being very instrumental to me particularly in those early years of my Ph.D. program.”
“The characteristics that have often been associated with Paul—positivity, creativity, humor, vision, humanity, and imagination—are, I hope, dimensions that I also bring to the work that I do as a scholar and as a teacher,” wrote Philip Edwards, 2004 fellowship recipient. Edwards credits the award with helping to broaden his professional horizons as a student: “Because of this funding, I was able to travel to conferences which I would have otherwise been unable to attend, and the interactions I had among other researchers and practitioners at these gatherings have been more valuable than I could have ever imagined.”
Christopher (Cal) Lee, who received the first Peters Fellowship, is currently a Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches a variety of subjects, including archival administration, records management, digital curation, understanding information technology for managing digital collections, and the construction of digital repository rules.