Dr. Charisse Madlock-Brown is a 2008 alum from SLIS. Dr. Madlock-Brown began her library career with an interest in rare books and reference, but after finding her first job at a medical library, felt there was so much missed opportunity in collection summarization and navigation that she found new passion, and got a grad position in Memphis at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center which began her pursuit of information. She worked helping build informatics infrastructure with healthcare data, living in a world of meta data, and documentation, she went on to get her PhD in Informatics, focusing her dissertation on emerging areas of biomedical research.

In 2014, universities started providing electronic data warehouses, making data access easier for those in 

Health Informatics, and as a recent PhD graduate, Dr. Madlock-Brown began a job at the University of Tennessee Memphis, working with real world data for the first time. Dr. Madlock-Brown describes Informatics as both Science and Engineering, where one is often both doing the research and creating and coding the infrastructure that organizes the data going forward. She is still doing a project with and remains in touch with her colleagues at the University of Tennessee, attempting to aid patients at risk of developing cancer find easier paths to making necessary healthier choices, where she is the lead on social determinants of health as well as making an interactive website.

Dr. Charisse Madlock-Brown is currently working as an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of Iowa. She emphasizes the ways in which her library science skills have perfectly blended into her stem-centered interests and made her journey from medical libraries to an informatics researcher and professor possible and seamless. She is currently working on four different funded projects, ranging from the effects of long-term COVID on sickle cell patients, to working on the NIH project All of Us which is aiming to create a repository of one million patients genomic and other health data to find links between illness, poverty, and other environmental factors. She was recently invited to be an Expert Witness in front of Congress on the long term effects of long COVID.

Her favorite part of her position at the College of Nursing is the supportive culture, where they welcome informatics in spite of them being ‘homeless academics’ without their own department; the strong collaborative structure leads to projects with multiple leads and fewer funding concerns. She also loves being allowed to research at the level she currently is.

While not a librarian, Dr. Madlock-Brown sees the impact of SLIS within her work everyday, saying she makes frequent use of data provenance, data transformation, and data documentation skills that she developed while in SLIS. She also believes that the way library education emphasizes notions of service and continued learning make library professionals better colleagues and collaborators, centering those ideals within her practice in Informatics.  She wants all SLIS students to “really try to explore the different ways that people apply the knowledge that you bring,” saying that what is learned at SLIS extends beyond it, and that by being open and exploratory SLIS students can “find a space where you have a unique contribution.”

We are proud of Dr. Madlock-Brown and the important work that she is doing. We’d like to thank her for taking the time to speak with us, and wish her well in all of her future endeavors!