Thea Atwood is the Public and Environmental Health Sciences Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington. She has been involved in the research process since 2005, when she pursued an independent study and honors thesis in letter learning, the importance of writing, and the associated brain activity, measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). After graduating from Indiana University in 2007 with her B.S. in Psychology, Thea took a position as an fMRI technologist with the Indiana University department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. This position played an integral part in her future pursuit of librarianship -- by witnessing firsthand the challenges of quality data collection, security, the fragility of digital data, the unexpected loss of data due to environmental disaster, and the challenges of the publishing process, she was emboldened to make science better.

Much of her career has focused on improving data management practices, both for students and for librarians. Her previous projects as UMass Amherst's Data Services Librarian include the establishment co-management of the UMass Amherst Data Repository, co-authorship of the campus's Research Data Management Strategic Plan, chairing the Faculty Senate's Research Computing Committee, and offering consultations and guidance to students, faculty, and other researchers on how to document and share their research data. She also enjoyed creating communities, and helped to found the New England-based Research Data Management Roundtables, now a standing Interest Group of ACRL-NEC, an informal, day-long event that brings together data management librarians to discuss current trends and issues in the field, and was on the Executive Committee for the New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium (or NESCLiC), which works to provide a community of Carpentries instructors to the New England region.

As the Public and Environmental Health Sciences Librarian at IU Bloomington, her interests now rely on her previous work as a data services librarian, where she hopes to incorporate reproducibility and data management into the classroom. She will also work to grow the Systematic Review service for the IU Bloomington campus.

In her free time, she likes to hang out and create with her kiddo, bake sweets, paint, and is an avid bullet journaler. She currently lives in Southern Indiana.