Emily Griffith receives the 2025 Libraries Faculty Award

The 2025 NC State University Libraries Faculty Award has been given to Dr. Emily Griffith, a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Statistics and the Director of Consulting for the Data Science and AI Academy (DSA). Griffith’s work in her home discipline of statistics, collaborations across disciplines, and partnership with the Libraries on the university’s Data Science Consulting program (DSC) embody the Libraries’ mission and commitment to open scholarship.

The Libraries Faculty Award recognizes NC State faculty members who have contributed consistently and notably to the accomplishment of the Libraries' mission, vision, and strategic initiatives. The award, established in commemoration of the Libraries’ centennial year in 1989, enables the Libraries to recognize faculty contributions and comes with an honorarium and recognition at the Friends of the Libraries fall event.

Griffith is the co-leader of the Data Science Consulting program with Mara Blake, head of the Libraries’ Data Science Services (DSS) department. The DSC has been a revelation in its inaugural year, helping hundreds of people—most particularly NC State graduate students—to design, collect and analyze their research data and to prepare presentations. The DSC helps make statistical and data science knowledge available to campus affiliates from across colleges and disciplines, ensuring that the university remains a leader in data science. Griffith continuously highlights the importance of the Libraries mission to campus and promotes the Libraries’ role in this partnership to her many connections across campus. 

“The Libraries is really on the leading edge regarding data services, and I started working with our faculty librarians on providing some statistical and data science consulting through data services in 2017,” Griffith says. “When the Data Science and AI Academy was created, we included a more official partnership with the Libraries to provide data science consulting to the NC State community.”

Free and available to all students, faculty and staff, the DSC pairs users with graduate student data science research consultants who help them find, prepare, analyze, understand and visualize data at any point in their research journey. Griffith mentors the consultants working in the program. 

“Everyone involved in the program works hard and works well together,” she says. “Our graduate student consultants are a joy to work with, as are the faculty librarians. It’s also fun to see them work together, learn new skills and engage in peer-to-peer learning with graduate student patrons.”

Griffith also exemplifies the Libraries’ interdisciplinary role on campus and its commitment to open education practices. Her publication history demonstrates Griffith’s interdisciplinary impact, showing her to be one of the most interconnected researchers across the university. On top of her many roles at NC State, she ensures that the outputs of her research are open and accessible to the largest audience possible—of her 95 works listed in the Citation Index, 49 are in open access publications.

“It’s a huge honor to receive the Faculty Award. I’m thrilled that this program has been such a success and deeply honored that my contributions are appreciated,” Griffith says. “Working on the DSC program is a highlight of my career. I’m excited to continue this work and glad to know that the Libraries enjoys working with me as well.”