We are excited to highlight one of our ‘10 alumni, Dr. Angela Murillo. Dr. Murillo’s path to librarianship was anything but straightforward, initially studying environmental science with an interest in paleoclimatology in her undergrad, hoping to work on climate change and resource allocation problems to ensure we’re taking better care of our planet. She also received degrees in English and Spanish at the same time. Her path changed due to Dr. Murillo’s proficiency with computers, which came naturally to her, and shortly earned her a place as a computing lab assistant at the University of Iowa, where she worked while receiving her three degrees. This part-time position led to her receiving a very good post-grad job, working in computing and desktop publishing as a self-taught programmer and technical trainer. She only came back for her master’s when she moved back to Iowa and found a position working in special collections due to family illness, finding that with this new life transition, returning for her master’s made sense, and with her love of her position in special collections, a professor in the programs words about the connections between data management and underlying cyber infrastructure, and the University of Iowa’s digital fellowship that it offered at the time, it finally felt like all of Dr. Murillo’s interests were meeting in a single place.

Following her MLIS, Dr. Murillo went straight for her PhD in information and library science, seeing the benefits of her MLIS degree all the while, saying to me that “we become so proficient in how to research, to educate, how to help with literacy, with data: that’s the essence of our field. We can separate ourselves in sub disciplines, but in public libraries or academic ones what we do is still the same.” She still utilizes the skills that SLIS taught in her daily work as an associate professor (celebrating a recent promotion!) and data science program director at Indiana University. There is a certain “interdisciplinarity” to her work, where because LIS is such a broad field “we can position ourselves into various places, we can focus on data, on literacy, on various services; because information is in everything.” 

Dr. Murillo has recently received a Fullbright, which will take her to Helsinki, Finland, starting in the spring semester. While there she will be working in partnership with a school there in continuing their global classroom program with Indiana University, which gives students in both locations the experience of what it’s like to work in an international setting; the challenges of timezones and the rewarding value of varying perspectives. She feels very honored to have received her Fulbright this year, and wants to work on more ways to create global classroom opportunities, seeing it as a way to open up study abroad access to students who have to work, or who couldn’t afford it otherwise. 

Since 2019, Dr. Murillo has been a part of the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Grant (award #2127548), which has allowed her to work with data and science infrastructure in a large community of wonderful information professionals to support scientists with their missions of inquiry. This position, in which she is the Director of their Student Fellowship Program,  allows her to work with undergraduates on skill development in the spring semester, and place them with real world research institutions in the summer semester, placing around twenty students a year for the last five years. 

Her success in Indiana doesn’t mean she’s forgotten Iowa City however, she emphasized to me how much she loved her time here: “the Iowa program had so many opportunities, part time and temporary jobs all constantly being available… it allowed for a lot of varied experience, working in special collections, in the government library, in data science, including working with the International Writers’ Workshop at Prairie Lights!” She also discussed that during her time here, every professor seemed to come at librarianship from a different perspective, even having a professor who worked as a lawyer, and another who had a corporate background; between the faculty and wide range of guest speakers, she feels as though she was given a great scope of the wide range of work in the LIS field. Her advice to current students echoes that sentiment: “Try everything, just go for it, you don’t know what your area of interest is going to be; and don’t be afraid to reach out to people and network. Your friends in your classes are going to be the people you work with… it’s a really fun professional community to be a part of, don’t forget there is always so much left to learn.”