The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce that five new faculty members have joined the iSchool in the 2024-2025 academic year.
“I am excited to support our new faculty members in their success and look forward to the positive impact they will have in the iSchool,” Interim Dean Soo Young Rieh said. “Their expertise and passion for teaching and research will greatly enrich the UT iSchool’s scholarly community, which has experienced significant growth in recent years.”
Dr. Andrea Baer
Associate Professor of Practice
Dr. Baer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and an MSIS from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. Prior to joining the iSchool, Andrea worked in academic libraries and instruction librarianship for over a decade. Dr. Baer’s research interests include critical and digital literacies, inclusive pedagogies, affect and learning, critical reflective practice, instruction librarians teaching roles and practices, and the intersections between information literacy and writing. At the iSchool, Baer will teach a section of I 302 Academic Success in the Digital University and INF 382S Library Instruction and Information Literacy. She will develop new courses on academic librarianship and scholarly communication.
Dr. Steve Hershman
Associate Professor of Practice
Dr. Hershman holds a PhD. from Harvard University in Systems Biology. Before joining the iSchool, Dr. Hershman held Director roles at Biofourmis, Stanford University, and LifeMap Solutions, where he advanced clinical trials using smartphones and wearables. His research interests include decentralized clinical trials, expert chatbots (nutritionists, scientists), and psychedelic informatics. He will teach I 310M Introduction to Health Informatics and I 320M Research Design and Analysis in Health Informatics.
Dr. Brian McInnis
Assistant Professor of Social Informatics
Dr. McInnis holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Information Science. He investigates the capability of computing systems to coordinate groups of people to problem-solve civic issues through informed discussion. Prior to joining UT Austin, Dr. McInnis was a postdoctoral scholar in the Research Center for Optimal Digital Ethics (ReCODE) as well as the Design Lab at UC San Diego, and worked at the RAND Corporation where he studied the design of youth summer learning programs, strategies for supporting families through active military deployment, and potential unintended consequences associated with the use of predictive policing systems. McInnis will be teaching I 305 Research Methods for Informatics and developing a new course at the graduate level.
Dr. Ryan Moore
Assistant Professor
Dr. Moore has a Ph.D. from Stanford University and will be spending the 2024-25 academic year as a New Map of Life Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity before he joins us in the Fall of 2025. Dr. Moore’s research focuses on older adults’ digital media and technology use. In his work, he aims to understand how older adults can effectively use digital media and technology to pursue everyday goals, as well as identify ways to help people build resilience to threats such as mis/disinformation and scams.
Dr. Nathan TeBlunthuis
Assistant Professor of Social Informatics
Dr. TeBlunthuis holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Washington. As a computational social scientist, he studies how people organize and cooperate online in projects like Wikipedia, online communities like Reddit, and social movements. In doing so, he develops innovative methods by drawing from machine learning, natural language processing, and statistics. Prior to joining the iSchool, Dr. TeBlunthuis was a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and before that at the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. TeBlunthuis will be teaching I 320S/320U Online Communities and I 306 Statistics for Informatics.