The American Society of Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has announced that GRAND HQP Lori McCay-Peet has been awared the Thomson Reuters Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship. Lori received the award at the recent ASIST&T 2012 Annual Meeting, October 26-30, 2012, in Baltimore, Maryland. The Scholarship is awarded annually and is designed to foster original and creative information science research that has the potential to make a practical and theoretical contribution to the field. 
Lori's research explores how we can better facilitate serendipity in digital environments such as websites, information systems, and applications and investigates the qualities of both the individual and the environment that facilitate serendipity. Lori's research will provide a conceptual model of the process of serendipity and develop a validated means of measuring how well systems, websites, and applications foster serendipity that can be further used to explore the complex interactions between the individual and their environment with respect to serendipity.
Elaine Toms, Lori's co-supervisor writes, "Lori has developed a solid research idea, a conceptual model to support it, and a preliminary pathway to follow. She has selected a risky topic -- that of serendipity, a word that is bandied about on a daily basis, but which is also a phenomenon that has intellectual and economic consequences. She has a natural ability to identify a problem, voraciously consume the background research, and propose a solution or direction. To every project, she has brought a logical and analytical approach with novel and innovative ideas."
Lori is involved in GRAND's NGAIA and NEWS projects and served as Co-chair of the Graduate Student Work-In-Progress (WIP) Review Committee for the GRAND 2011 conference in Vancouver. Currently in her 4th year of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program at Dalhousie University in the faculties of Management and Computer Science, Lori holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship. Her research is supported by grants to Elaine Toms from GRAND NCE, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Canadian Foundation of Innovation (CFI). For more information on ASIS&T, visit http://www.asis.org