Zou to Receive the 2026 Doctoral Dissertation Award

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Ning Zou is the 2026 recipient of the ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation titled, "From Data to Action: Towards a Framework for Collaborative Personal Informatics in Dementia Care."

The award’s purpose is to recognize outstanding recent doctoral candidates whose research contributes significantly to an understanding of some aspect of information science. The award is intended to encourage participation of new PhDs in the activities of a professional association by providing a forum for the presentation of their research and assisting them with some travel support.

Zou, whose doctoral work was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, was selected as the winner from among a pool of outstanding candidates who were judged based on these criteria: Importance of the topic to theory development and/or practical applications in information science; soundness of methodology; organization and clarity of the presentation; and quality of data (when applicable).

In supporting Zou's work, her advisor, Daqing He, wrote “In more than two decades of supervising doctoral research, this is the most significant work I have overseen. Dr. Zou's selection of self-tracking in dementia care demonstrates what rigorous site selection achieves. While HCI and CSCW have studied self-tracking extensively, information science has not fully deployed its theoretical resources on what collective, relational, morally weighted self-tracking practices could be. Dementia care makes this gap unavoidable by eliminating core assumptions: that the person whose data are collected participates in making them meaningful, that tracking is chosen rather than necessitated, and that the primary agent of sense-making is a capable individual. What emerges is data work at its most complex: distributed across actors with asymmetric knowledge and access, sustained through inadequate infrastructure, freighted with proxy decision-making for someone who can no longer full make such decision. This characterizes serious illness and dependency broadly, not dementia alone. Dr. Zou's Collaborative Personal Informatics framework—synthesizing collaborative information behavior, information worlds theory, and data lifecycle scholarship—provides our field's most rigorous account of collective data work."

Upon learning of her selection as the award winner, Zou said, “I am deeply grateful to ASIS&T and the doctoral dissertation award jury for this recognition. I did not expect this, but I always believed this work mattered. I spent years trying to understand something that became impossible to ignore once I saw it: that caring for someone with dementia is also, deeply, an information science problem. And what made that real to me was not the theory but the people who participated in this research, who showed me, in every conversation, how much they were carrying. This award is for them as much as it is for me, and I hope it helps bring more attention to the invisible work they do every day."

Zou will receive the award during the 2026 meeting of ASIS&T which will be held 6-10 November 2026 in Bangkok, Thailand.

About ASIS&T

The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is the only professional association that bridges the gap between information science practice and research. For nearly 90 years, ASIS&T has been leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.