Five to Receive Rising Star Awards at SLA 2018
Many awards and honors recognize contributions and achievements over the course of a career. But some people start making their mark early and never stop or even slow down. The Special Libraries Association has an award just for them: the Rising Star Award.
At the SLA 2018 Annual Conference in June, five early-career library and information professionals will receive Rising Star Awards, which are given to SLA members with up to five years of experience who have already demonstrated leadership and the ability to creatively solve problems. The following individuals will be recognized as Rising Stars: Willow Fuchs, Anya Bartelmann, Eric Tans, Caren Torrey, and Heidi Tebbe.
Willow Fuchs
Willow Fuchs has focused on developing and honing her leadership skills during her four years of SLA membership, serving as president of the Iowa Chapter in 2016 and 2017 and on the Web Content Committee for the Business & Finance Division. A 2008 MLIS graduate of the University of Toronto, Willow worked in both Canada and England before accepting her current position as business reference and instruction librarian at the University of Iowa in 2014. At Iowa, she co-founded the Teaching Librarians’ Journal Club and has co-chaired the Scholarly Communications and Publishing Committee. This year, she is participating in the Building University of Iowa Leadership for Diversity program.
Anya Bartelmann
Anya Bartelmann earned her MLIS from the University of Washington in 2013, the same year she joined SLA. After graduating, she was hired to be the physics, astronomy, and mathematics librarian at UW, a position she held for one year before being promoted to head of the Mathematics Research Library. Within SLA, she has been especially active in the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) Division, serving as assistant editor and then editor of the PAM Bulletin, as moderator of the PAM Physics Roundtable at the SLA Annual Conference, and, as of this year, treasurer of the division (through 2019). She has also mentored two MLIS students through SLA’s Pacific Northwest Chapter.
Eric Tans
A prolific author and speaker on topics ranging from green library initiatives to collection management to the science and politics of sustainable seafood, Eric Tans has made a name for himself in SLA as well. He is in his second year as chair of the SLA Environment & Resource Management Division (now the Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Resources Division) and served on the division’s board in 2014–2015. He pitched an idea for a session on seed libraries at the SLA 2015 Annual Conference, then recruited speakers and moderated the session after his proposal was accepted. His session on water and the southwest at SLA 2017 was rated among the highest on post-conference surveys. When not working on SLA initiatives, Eric can be found in the Michigan State University Libraries, where he is the environmental sciences librarian.
Caren Torrey
Caren Torrey got involved in SLA while an MLIS student, heading the SLA student group at Simmons College and managing a joint SLA-Simmons forum on effective leadership and communication at the 2015 Annual Conference in Boston. She has remained active in SLA since graduating, serving on the New England Chapter’s Professional Development Committee and as 2018 president-elect and also as webmaster for the Pharmaceutical & Health Technologies (PHT) Division. She presented a paper at the 2017 PHT meeting on her efforts to develop a central library at Alkermes Inc., where she was working as research and development librarian. She is now the library operations manager at Biogen, which manufactures therapies for people living with serious neurological, autoimmune, and rare diseases.
Heidi Tebbe
Although a relative newcomer to the librarian profession, Heidi Tebbe exhibits the same curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy that guided her previous careers in astronomy and immersive media. Now the collections and research librarian for engineering and data science at North Carolina State University, where she serves on the Visualization Services Team and the Social Media Working Group, Heidi has lent her talents to projects ranging from Dynamic Sun—in which a high-definition, near-real-time image of the sun was projected onto a wall in the main library—to a history of women in STEM fields at the university. Within SLA, she is active in the PAM Division, where she serves on the Professional Development Committee.
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