OFFICE OF THE VICE-PRESIDENT RESEARCH

Abby Goodrum is the inaugural Vice-President: Research at Wilfrid Laurier University. 

The Vice-President: Research leads Laurier’s Office of Research Services, providing vision, strategy and support for Laurier’s overall research endeavors, raising the profile of research at Laurier, and through the Office of Research Services, assisting faculty in obtaining the necessary resources to support their research and scholarship.

Her portfolio includes oversight of both the Office of Research Services and the Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

PROFILE

Dr. Goodrum holds degrees in Radio, TV and Film, and in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas, and a PhD in Information Science from the University of North Texas. 

Dr. Goodrum started her career as a journalist, working as a researcher with CNN.  She began her academic career at Drexel University before moving to Syracuse University, where she was a faculty member in the School of Information Studies as well as a research scientist at the Information Institute of Syracuse and research associate with the Convergence Center for Communication and Media Studies.   She spent a sabbatical at the University of Waterloo as a visiting research professor in the Canadian Centre of Arts and Technology.  From 2004 to 2011, she was on the faculty of Ryerson University where she held the Velma Rogers Graham Research Chair in News, Media, and Technology and where she served as Associate Dean for Scholarly Research and Creative Activities in the Faculty of Communication and Design. 

RESEARCH 

Dr. Goodrum has authored more than fifty book chapters, journal articles and conference papers.  She has served on the editorial boards of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, the Journal of Communication Studies, J-Source: The Canadian Journalism Project, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology and the Annual Review of Information Science & Technology.

Dr. Goodrum is also the Director for Social Science and Humanities Research in the nationwide Network of Centres of Excellence in Graphics, Animation and New Media (NCE GRAND), and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Design Institute based at the University of Toronto.

Although she is a highly cited researcher in information science, her work bridges multiple disciplines and appears in the journal literature of Computer Science, Humanities, Communication Studies, Information Management, and Film Studies.  For more than 15 years, Dr. Goodrum's research has focused on Media Informatics, the study of how humans seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia.  Closely related to Informatics, Media Informatics studies the behaviours and practices related to new media objects and environments including social, network, political, entertainment, communication and information aspects of new media content. 

Dr. Goodrum also sits on the boards of Canada's Technology Triangle, the Canadian Digital Media Network, the Accelerator Centre, and SHARCNET.