Dr. Jannica Heinstrom earned a Masters Degree in Psychology in 1994 from Abo Akademi University and a PhD (Information Studies) in 2002, and has studied at the Department of Information Studies, Sheffield, UK, (1998) and as a member of the Finnish "National Doctoral Programme for Communication and Information Studies".She served as Lecturer and Researcher in the same department, Information Studies, at Abo Akademi University.

Her visit to SCILS in spring 2004 was financed by a Fulbright scholarship. In fall 2004, she worked on a grant from the Academy of Finland, and in Spring 2005 she joined the IMLS project "Impact of School Libraries on Student Learning" at CISSL, together with Professors Kuhlthau, Todd and Wacholder at SCILS.

Dr. Ya Ling Lu, Leading Researcher, Children's Information Seeking and Use, Assistant professor in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Dr. Lu was a high school teacher in homeland of Taiwan. She received her PhD from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) under the instruction of Dr. Virginia Walter. Her research interest mainly focuses on how children's materials are selected, provided, and used to meet children's diverse information needs in differing social and education institutions. She is also interested in the impact of books or stories on children.

Emily Seitz graduated from The College of Wooster (OH) with a Bachelor of Arts (majoring in English) in 1998 and received her Master of Library and Information Science at Rutgers-SCILS in 2004. She has worked as a reference librarian in public libraries, most recently at Mercer County Library, and as a youth services librarian at Princeton Public Library. She is now undertaking doctoral studies in library and information science at SCILS, and her studies are supported by a fellowship provided by Scholastic Inc.

As a Scholastic Fellow, Ms. Seitz is working on a series of projects that examine how students learn through school libraries and how those learning outcomes can be documented. In addition, Ms. Seitz is interested in exploring cooperation between public libraries and school libraries. More broadly, her ongoing research interests include human information behavior, especially the information-seeking behavior of youth and the evaluation of library services.