Jeffrey Bardzell will become the new dean of the School of Information and Library Science on April 1, Provost Christopher Clemens announced in a campus-wide email on Friday.
Bardell is the associate dean for faculty and graduate affairs in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. He will take Gary Marchionini's position, who served as the SILS dean since 2010. Marchionini will step down from the position and return to the faculty.
"Jeff joins SILS during record growth in enrollment and grant funding and is poised to continue its success," Clemens said in the email.
Clemens said Bardzell is a "well-established interdisciplinary researcher" in human-computer interaction and design. Along with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, Bardzell's research has spanned from social informatics to AI and "more-than-human" design.
Bardzell worked with approximately 75 full-time faculty while supporting over 2,000 combined undergraduate and graduate students during his time as an associate dean at Penn State, Clemens said. He joined the Pennsylvania university as a professor and associate dean of undergraduate and graduate studies for the institution in 2020.
In addition to leading or co-leading research that totals in $13 million in external grants, he also led projects at Penn State concerning generative AI as well as a redesign of doctoral student recruitment and faculty onboarding, Clemens said.
"For over 90 years, the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill has educated such leaders, while shaping the fields of library and information science," Bardzell said in a statement. "I’m grateful to be joining a school so steadily guided by a deep commitment to the quality of and access to information as a foundation of democratic society."
Before his time at Penn State, Bardzell worked as a professor and director of human-computer interaction design at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Bloomington in addition to holding visiting professorships at Shih Chien University, Taiwan, and Aarhus University, Denmark.
