Dr. Kate McDowell focuses on storytelling as information research, social justice storytelling, and how the history of library storytelling can enhance contemporary data storytelling. Her writing appears in Library Quarterly, College and Research Libraries, and JASIST, where her article Storytelling wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW theorizes storytelling as a fundamental information form. She advises regional, national, and international nonprofits, including work with the World Health Organization on storytelling responses to online health misinformation. McDowell leads the nationally-funded Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians, currently in development to equip public libraries with the narrative tools they need to thrive in the data-driven era. McDowell is an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her teaching on both storytelling and data storytelling was internationally celebrated with the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2022.