LSU Remembers Professor Yejun Wu

The LSU community mourns the loss of its distinguished colleague, Yejun Wu, PhD. After a long illness, Dr. Wu entered hospice care in mid-June and passed away on June 30. He was 56 years old.

Dr. Yejun Wu earned his PhD in Information Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 and joined the School of Information Studies as an Assistant Professor in 2008. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014.

“Dr. Wu was a valued asset for the School, the College, the University, and our entire professional community. He was a kind and supportive colleague, always ready to lend a hand or take on a task. One of the things I will remember is that each spring he would bring in bags of Satsumas from his trees for the entire faculty. And he had a wonderful, joyous laugh. He will be greatly missed,” said School of Information Studies Director Carol Barry, PhD.

Dr. Wu was a world-renowned expert in knowledge organization systems and digital repositories. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Dr. Wu received a significant grant to develop an interdisciplinary topic map to understand its impact. He published his findings in Oil Spill Impacts: Taxonomic and Ontological Approaches in 2016 and was awarded an LSU Office of Innovation & Technology Commercialization award for his work.

Dr. Wu dedicated significant time in service to the profession and LSU. He served as a program committee member for more than ten international conferences. Additionally, he was on the editorial board of Aslib Journal of Information Management, Knowledge Organization, Data Intelligence, and The Electronic Library. In recognition of his sustained research excellence and service to the information science and technology field, the Association for Information Science & Technology named Dr. Wu an ASIS&T Distinguished Member in 2022.

At LSU, Dr. Wu taught several technology-focused courses including Information Technologies and Systems, Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval Systems, e-Discovery, Principles of Searching, and Construction of Indexing Languages and Thesauri. In 2012, he developed a service learning component within his courses and received a Happy Award for excellence in service learning from the LSU Center for Community Engagement, Learning, and Leadership (CCELL).

“Professor Wu led a distinguished career at LSU and his important research will continue to serve our state and beyond for decades to come. Most importantly, he made a positive impact on his students – a legacy that will live on. Yejun was an extraordinary colleague, and we will miss him,” said LSU College of Human Sciences & Education Dean Roland Mitchell.