Kaitlin Costello

I am a third-year PhD student in information science at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My advisor is Dr. Barbara Wildemuth. I am funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research Interventions for Preventing and Managing Chronic Illness grant as a pre-doctoral fellow. My mentor on this project is Dr. Mi-Kyung Song. I am broadly interested in the intersection of health informatics, online support, and privacy. Specifically, my research focuses on online support groups for patients with chronic kidney disease. I am particularly interested in what motivates kidney patients to share personal health information in online support groups. I have also done research in the area of personal health information management and enabling information sharing in personal health records.