The Health Sciences Library is fortunate to have a team of professional librarians who are interested and skilled in various aspects of support to bioinformatics and biomedical sciences. Please feel free to ask questions via our Ask a Librarian form or by contacting one of us directly.

Barrie Hayes is a Librarian in the User Services Department at the Health Sciences Library. She has a BS degree in Biology from North Carolina State University and an MS in Library Sciences from the UNC School of Information and Library Science. She has a background in information services and web systems development and has most recently been managing HSL's Application Development Services Department.

With the goal of providing more support and service to UNC's growing research in the field of bioinformatics, the Health Sciences Library recently named Barrie to assess the scope and status of current efforts as well as plan for future collaborations. In addition to this yearlong special assignment, Barrie will continue to manage the HSL/RENCI Collaboration Center and support library services for bioinformatics decribed on the Bioinformatics@HSL page located off of the More Collections link from the HSL home page. In June 2008, a formal report will be distributed outlining the next steps for developing a more comprehensive HSL Bioinformatics program.

Vedana (Nani) Vaidhyanathan is a Masters student in the Bioinformatics Certificate program at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. She is also the CCGS-HSL-SILS Biomedical Informatics Fellow for 2006-08. In this fellowship position, Nani is working with HSL and SILS faculty to develop and provide research support and training services for biomedical informatics community at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Karen Crowell is a User Services Librarian at the Health Sciences Library. She earned a BS degree in Human Development at Eckerd College and a master's degree in Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida. During her recent fellowship in Medical Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she researched the use of mobile technology in health care. She now provides consultations, hosts forums and moderates a discussion list on the use of mobile technology. She also has experience teaching evidence based medicine to medical students and residents, serves on the team that authors the NC AHEC Evidence Based Medicine Education Center of Excellence web site, and provides literature searches for Clinical Inquiries as a librarian member of the Family Practice Inquiries Network.

Several additional librarians at the Health Sciences Library teach individual consultations and classroom lectures on the use of biomedical literature databases for research, including PubMed and BIOSIS. Please feel free to contact us via our Ask a Librarian service, or to request a consultation or class via our Request a Class form.