Alison J. Head, Ph.D. is an information scientist and social science researcher. She is the founder and director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national, nonprofit research institute in the San Francisco Bay Area that investigates how people, including college and university students, conceptualize and operationalize research tasks for school, life, work and most recently, for engaging with news, algorithms, and information about climate change.
Head taught new media and communication theory as a professor for 25 years before starting PIL at the University of Washington iSchool, where she was a principal research scientist for seven years. She has held joint appointments as a research scientist at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Library Innovation Lab and the metaLAB, all at Harvard University. Head has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Purdue University, University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University. Currently, she is a Fulbright Specialist for the Fulbrights' World Learning Program 2023-26.
Head has a Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of California at Berkeley where she also received her MLS and BA. She also holds a MS in journalism from Boston University.