School of Informatics and Computing alumna Tammy Toscos was recently awarded the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award at iConference 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas, the annual meeting of the iSchools. The winners will receive $2,500 and were honored at the iConference Awards Luncheon on February 14. Sixteen dissertations were submitted to the competition, and from that pool three semi-finalists were selected. Each one received reviews from a pool of 16 reviewers, including 14 iSchool Ph.D. program chairs.
Tammy’s dissertation, titled “Digital Vigilance: Pervasive Technology for Children with Type 1 Diabetes” investigates how to design technologies to help children with type 1 diabetes and their families transition the child from parent-care to self-care.
Tammy is an assistant professor of health informatics at Indiana University Purdue University-Fort Wayne (IPFW) and a Postdoctoral Health Services Research Fellow at Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. While earning her Ph.D. in Informatics on the Bloomington campus, she studied human-computer interaction design (HCI-d) with professors Kay Connelly and Yvonne Rogers as her primary advisors. Tammy’s research lies at the intersection of HCI-d and health informatics, focusing how to design interactive technologies to help people achieve personal health goals.
“Tammy is very deserving of this award,” said Kay Connelly, associate professor of informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing and Toscos’ primary advisor during her Ph.D. program. “In all my years advising students on their dissertations, this dissertation is more the student’s work than any I’ve ever seen. It is a model of what an informatics dissertation should be – it pursues an important societal problem, acknowledges and is sensitive to the multi-faceted issues, employs a variety of methods to develop an understanding, and demonstrates an impact on real people’s lives.”
The iSchools organization is a collection of Information Schools dedicated to advancing the information field. These schools, colleges, and departments have been newly created or are evolving from programs formerly focused on specific tracks such as information technology, library science, informatics, information science, and more. While each individual iSchool has its own strengths and specializations, together they share a fundamental interest in the relationships between information, people, and technology.
Founded in 2000 as the first School of its kind in the United States, the Indiana University School of Informatics is dedicated to research and teaching across a broad range of computing and information technology, with emphases on science, applications, and societal implications. The School includes the School of Informatics at IUPUI and the School of Informatics and Computing at Bloomington, where programs include computer science and informatics. The School administers a variety of bachelor's and master's degree programs in computer science and informatics, as well as Ph.D. programs in computer science, and the first-ever Ph.D. in informatics. The School is dedicated to excellence in education and research, to partnerships that bolster economic development and entrepreneurship, and to increasing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in computing and technology. For more information, visit www.soic.indiana.edu.