Chirag Shah

Chirag Shah, a reasearcher in collaborative information seeking is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. His research interests include studies of interactive information retrieval, information seeking, especially in the context of online social networks and collaborations, contextual information mining, and applications of social media services for exploring critical socio-political issues. He is also interested in various theoretical and practical aspects of information as a dynamic construct, and online information propagation.
Education and research
Education
He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. He holds an MTech, Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India and an MS, Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published and talked extensively on topics related to social information seeking and collaborative information seeking, including a new book published by Springer.
Research
The focus of Chirag Shah's research is information seeking. Specifically, he is interested in information seeking activities that take place in groups/collaboration, or in online communities using various social media or networking services. His primary objective for studying these topics is to develop a theoretical framework for investigating information seeking and behavior involving multiple actors/participants and their interactions that is lacking for collaborative and social situations. Another related objective is to build a model for evaluating and explaining various aspects of information propagation through interactions among people whether they are working in close collaboration or connected through open online communities. A by-product of such investigations would be their applications to analyzing various socio-political issues through social media usage and user participation.
He has published extensively in the areas of collaborative information seeking, and social information seeking.
Awards and Honors
* NSF's Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and in Education and Human Resources (BCC-SBE/EHR) for project "Building Communities for Transforming Social Media Research with SOCRATES: SOcial and CRowdsourced AcTivities Extraction System" (Sept. 2012-Feb. 2015; $219,126)
* Early Faculty Career Development Grant from IMLS for project "CIS3: Collaborative Information Seeking Support and Services in Libraries" (Sept. 2012-Aug. 2015; $272,996).
* Dept. of Library & Information Science (LIS) at School of Communication & Information (SC&I) Research Award 2012.
* National Leadership Grant from IMLS with Dr. Marie Radford (Rutgers) and Dr. Lynn Connaway (OCLC) for project "Cyber Synergy" (Oct. 2011-Sept. 2013; $250,000)
* Yahoo! Campus Innovation Award for project "Reimagining and Reinvigorating Information Seeking with a Novel Approach to Collaborative Information Seeking" ($20,000).
* Best Paper Award in the Political Communication category at the International Communication Association (ICA) annual meeting.
* [http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/news/sc-i-researcher-seeks-better-answers-from-the-internet-and-the-library.html OCLC/ALISE Library & Information Science Research Grant Program (LISRGP)] for project "Modalities, Motivations, and Materials: Investigating Traditional and Social Online Q&A Services" ($14,408).
* Best Political Science Software Award to ContextMiner by American Political Science Association.
* 3rd prize for the paper at [http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com/ "YouTube and 2008 Elections Cycle"] conference. Fall 2009.
* for his paper on collaborative search.
* Induction in the IEEE Student Paper Contest Hall of Fame for Region 10 in 2002.
Public Life
At , he runs a research group on Information Seeking and Behavior , as well as special interest groups on Collaborative Information Seeking and Social Information Seeking. He also belongs to Social Media group.
Private Life
Chirag Shah was born in India on September 3, 1978 to Rajendrakumar and Sneha Shah. He was raised in Gujarat. According to his homepage, he lives in Somerset, New Jersey with his wife Lori, their daughter Sophie, two dogs, a guinea pig, and a fish. He is a competitive ballroom dancer and teacher, and an avid traveler.

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