Kathleen Fox, who graduated in 2017 from the City University of New York at Queens College with an M.S. in Library Science, arrived at the Penn Libraries this past fall. With a passion for health sciences librarianship, she is contributing greatly to the mission of the Biomedical Library in supporting clinical care and evidence-based medicine.

Kathleen particularly enjoys working with the Biomedical Library’s Systematic Reviews team for which she helps design and execute complex search strategies. She and the team have also been working with Penn’s Center for Evidence-based Practice (CEP) to perform Rapid Reviews, intensive literature search projects which are systematic in methodology but require a quicker turnaround time than full Systematic Reviews. Most recently, Fox crafted a search for CEP along with Graduate & Clinical Research Liaison Sherry Morgan on couplet care (in which mothers and newborns remain together in the same hospital room) in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, so that the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania can make decisions based on the best available research evidence.

Kathleen’s previous position was as Medical Librarian at a teaching hospital affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In addition to her health sciences interests, she is passionate about scholarly communications, institutional repositories, and research impact metrics. We are thrilled that Kathleen decided to branch out into an academic medical library where she could explore such services while still contributing to patient care.

The Eugene Garfield Residency in Science Librarianship was established by former Penn Libraries Overseer Eugene Garfield. The residency provides a new librarian with practical experience and a broad overview of science librarianship. The residency is also intended to serve as a diversity initiative, encouraging, but not requiring, applications from members of underrepresented communities.

Kathleen, like the previous residents, recognizes that Eugene Garfield is a legendary figure in the field of library and information science, having founded the Institute for Scientific Information (now part of Clarivate Analytics) which created the first citation-based indexes to allow for locating more recent articles that cite earlier articles, as well as highly innovative table-of-contents services.  To have the Garfield name reflected in the residents’ title clearly establishes that this program is all about a love for innovation in the profession, a love of bibliometrics, and a love for science.  Kathleen Fox truly embodies this spirit.

Read more about Kathleen in the Penn Libraries blog post.