Melissa Gross is a professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and a past president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998 and was awarded the prestigious American Association of University Women Recognition Award for Emerging Scholars in 2001. She teaches and does research in the areas of Information seeking behavior, resources for youth, research methods, the evaluation of library programs and services, information literacy, and teacher and librarian collaboration. She has published extensively in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and is author, co-author, or co-editor of ten books.