Dr. Lynette (Kvasny) Yarger is associate dean for equity and inclusion at the Schreyer Honors College and professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn  State. In the 2018-2019 academic year, she worked as an Administrative Fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and CIO. She earned the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the College of IST George J. McMurtry Teaching and Learning Award, and the Penn State Teaching Fellow Award.  Before joining the faculty at IST, she worked as a software engineer at AT&T, was a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies, and was a product lifecycle manager at Avaya Communications.

Dr. Yarger's research uses critical social theories to examine how historically underserved groups appropriate information and communication technologies to improve their life chances. Areas of study include community computing initiatives in economically oppressed communities, the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the IT workforce, ethnic and gender identity performance in online spaces, and the use of social media for political activism and social justice. Her research activities have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Oracle Help Us Help Foundation, the Penn State Africana Research Center, and the Penn State Children, Youth and Family Consortium. The results of her interdisciplinary research have been published in over 75 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings, including the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Information Systems Journal, Communication Research, and the Journal of the Medical Informatics Association.