Alison Head

Alison Head is the Executive Director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a public benefit nonprofit dedicated to conducting ongoing, large-scale research about college students and their research habits and strategies in the digital age. Since 2008, PIL has studied over 11,000 students on 52 U.S. campuses (including Harvard College). PIL has investigated how college students conduct research and find information for their coursework and for dealing with the demands of their everyday lives. In 2012, PIL launched "The PIL Passage Studies," a unique series of in-depth investigations about young adults and the critical information transitions they  experience in their lives. In October, 2012, PIL released it's latest Passage Study about the information-seeking behavior of college students once they graduate and join the workplace.

Since 2011, Alison has been a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a Fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. She is an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Alison earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Information Science and was a Visiting Scholar, studying Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University. During 1997 - 2007, she taught as the Roy Disney Visiting Professor in New Media at Saint Mary's College of California.