Kathleen Burr Oliver, MSLS, MPH, is Associate Director for Information Services Research, Development, and Communication at the Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins University. She holds a faculty appointment in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Division of Health Sciences Informatics. Kate’s funded research is in testing new health information services and service roles. Since 2004, her teams have brought in over a million dollars in external funding for research and training in this area. From 2003 to 2007 she served as a part-time ORISE Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) where she focused on developing the informationist role in public health. Out of that fellowship emerged a partnership between Johns Hopkins, the CDC Information Center (IC) and the CDC Global AIDS Program (GAP) to sponsor one of the first National Library of Medicine Informationist Fellows. Kate served as the fellowship mentor, overseeing fieldwork in the CDC GAP’s Vietnam and Zimbabwe programs. Prior to her current position she directed education programming for the Welch advanced technology group.

Before coming to Hopkins in 1998, Kate managed a number of small scientific and medical libraries including those of NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratory, American College of Cardiology, and AMA Washington Office. She served as a reference librarian and search analyst at the NIH Library, Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, and UCLA’s Biomedical Library. Kate was a project director for Georgetown University’s Public Services Laboratory in the conduct of a literature review of a 20th-century cost of illness study, and with funding from NSF, developed science Web resource pages for the public radio documentary group, Soundprint. Her public health training focused on maternal and child health policy, planning and evaluation, and her undergraduate degree is in biology and chemistry.