Dr. Melissa G. Ocepek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the School of Information Sciences. Her research draws on ethnographic methods and institutional ethnography to explore how individuals use information in their everyday lives. Her research interests include everyday information behavior, critical theory, and food. Recently, Dr. Ocepek co-edited Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons (Cambridge, 2025) with Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo. Previously she published Deciding Where to Live (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) with William Aspray and two books that address the intersection of food, information, and culture: Food in the Internet Age and Formal and Informal Approaches to Food Policy (both with William Aspray and George Royer, 2013 and 2014). Dr. Ocepek received her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information.
