Information School Professor Catherine Arnott Smith, who has served on the iSchool faculty since 2006, is retiring from the university after the spring semester. She was the first faculty member hired with a focus on medical informatics and medical information, and has dedicated her career to research and teaching that helps expand access to health information.
“Early in my career, I noticed that many healthcare problems are also information science problems,” Arnott Smith said.
With a diverse academic and professional background, Arnott Smith obtained her PhD after working as a medical librarian for a leading reinsurance company. As the digital age has transformed the collection and availability of health information, Arnott Smith has explored how consumers and patients interact with digital medical resources, from patient portals to online bulletin boards, in public libraries, archives and college disability student services. One big motivator throughout her career, she said, has been “patient advocacy,” ensuring patients and their loved ones have access to and understanding of the critical health information they need to make sound decisions.
Reflecting on her two decades at UW–Madison, Arnott Smith singled out Kristin Eschenfelder, former iSchool director, for being “super supportive from the very beginning,” and “championing” the integration of medical informatics into the iSchool research landscape. She also expressed gratitude for the ability to work on a campus with a top medical school, an atmosphere that enables medical informatics researchers to thrive.
Regarding teaching, she explained, “My warmest feelings are about discovering that I could bring my research into a class that I thought at the outset would not be possible for me to teach. That’s how I discovered that medical information actually has a huge potential audience.”
When Arnott Smith started teaching, she said, “I always envisioned training students who would go work in hospital libraries and academic medical centers, and work at Epic doing medical computing—and I’ve had plenty of students do that.” However, she added, “What I was pleasantly surprised by was that there was actually a lot of interest from the folks who want to do public librarianship, because in fact, the public library is where most people look for medical information. And if I hadn’t been in a situation where I was teaching future public librarians, I would never have understood that.”
The iSchool is grateful for Professor Catherine Arnott Smith’s dedication to research and education on these important societal issues. By helping bring medical informatics to the iSchool, she opened new areas of research that current and future faculty and students will pursue long into the future.
Thank you, Professor Catherine Arnott Smith!