Rebecca Y. Bayeck (New York Public Library) received a dual Ph.D. in Learning Design and Technology as well as Comparative International Education from Pennsylvania State University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies, she will work with staff and scholars-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to gather and curate data and resources for digital projects focusing on abolition, transatlantic slavery, the Green Books, early Black librarianship, and other topics. Her interdisciplinary research is at the interface of several fields, including educational technology, the learning sciences, literacy studies, and game studies. She explores literacies and learning in games, particularly board games, and analyzes the impact of factors, such as gender and culture, on interactions, collaboration, learning, and design on online learning environments.

Mary Borgo Ton (Indiana University) earned her Ph.D. in British Literature with a certificate in Digital Arts and Humanities from Indiana University. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she will collaborate with faculty and library staff to develop pedagogy strategies for Archivo Mesoamericano, a digital archive that includes annotated historical and ethnographic video materials created in collaboration with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico, the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America in Nicaragua, and the Museum of the Word and the Image in El Salvador. As a media archaeologist, she adopts digital approaches to Victorian travel narratives in order to study the global history of early screen culture.

Andrew Brown (University of Toronto) received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University. As Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI), he will work with faculty and staff across the university’s three campuses to coordinate digital humanities workshops and support new scholarly collaborations. As part of JHI’s 2019-20 research theme of “Strange Weather,” he will also undertake a digital humanities project examining how early modern people experienced the threat that sweeping changes in climate conditions posed to the water resources of their growing cities. His research focuses on early modern literature and the history of the book.

Maia Call (U.S. Agency for International Development) received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, she will work with USAID’s Data Services team to bring state-of-the-art digital management, data curation, research, and library science practices to USAID’s broad portfolio of digital services. She will also consult regularly with internal and external stakeholders in the development data community to provide guidance to USAID in shaping standard processes and procedures, articulating and developing public engagement and instructional training materials, and applying findings to USAID’s data curation efforts.

Guillaume Candela (Brown University) received his Ph.D. in Hispanic and Latin American Studies from the University of Paris-Sorbonne-Nouvelle. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at The John Carter Brown Library (JCB), he will assist in developing a digital platform that uses and refines metadata from the Library’s Indigenous Languages of the Americas collection. His work will connect digitized maps, books, and manuscripts from the JCB’s collection through a dynamic platform that will promote the historical and linguistic diversity of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas during the colonial period. He will also collaborate with national and international scholars and Indigenous communities, especially in South America, to include audio and video materials with native speakers.

Christian Casey (New York University) earned his Ph.D. in Egyptology at Brown University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Digital Scholarship, he will work with library staff and faculty at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) to develop tools and materials for the use of digital technology in humanities education and scholarship. Casey will also contribute to several ISAW projects, including the Ancient World Digital Library, the Digital Central Asian Archaeology collection, and the Ancient World Image Bank. During his fellowship, he will develop computational tools for the study of ancient languages and undertake research at the intersection of Egyptology, library science, and digital humanities.

Alicia Cowart (University of Colorado, Boulder) received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. As Geospatial Data Services Postdoctoral Fellow based in the university libraries’ Department of Open and Digital Scholarship, she will create a research support program for the geospatial research needs of faculty and students across disciplines. She will plan and develop library services for creating, locating, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial data in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Cowart has taught geography at two community colleges and served as the staff cartographer and cartography lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Faithe Day (Purdue University) earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Michigan. As CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Studies, she will undertake data curation projects in collaboration with scholars from the African American Studies and Research Center and faculty from Purdue’s university libraries. Using the projects as case studies, she will work to identify critical frameworks and best practices to ensure an ethical, community-engaged, and justice-centered approach to data curation. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other identity markers as they are performed within various spheres of digital media. Specifically, she studies the role that online commenting communities play in the construction and consideration of Black Queer identity as well as the algorithmic underpinnings of social media platforms.

Zachary Furste (Carnegie Mellon University) received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University. As CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, he will collaborate with faculty, staff, and students to develop strategies for preserving and curating executable archival materials, such as research software, digital scholarship, and code-based artworks. He will also play a key role in developing software preservation and curation workflows, policies, and strategies in the University’s libraries. Previously, Furste held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California.

Amani Morrison (University of Delaware) earned her Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. During her Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Data Curation, she will work with the Colored Conventions Project team of library staff, faculty, and graduate students to expand the reach and usability of project data by supporting the transition to a new digital platform. She will devise and implement strategies for managing ambiguous data in Black digital archives and will help coordinate existing and new partnerships with student team members, institutional partners, and the local community.

Aditya Ranganath (New York University) received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Geospatial Data Curation and Preservation, he will work with the data services team at NYU Libraries to expand NYU’s infrastructure supporting geospatial research on campus and in the broader research community. He will contribute to programs in geospatial data collection, access (especially through open-source initiatives such as GeoBlacklight), and metadata creation and remediation.

Brian A. Robinson (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) earned his Ph.D. in American History from the University of South Carolina at Columbia. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies, he will work with the University Libraries’ Information Technology and Electronic Resources Department to develop web-based content for engaging with and training teachers to use the Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS). Working with DLAS and other partners, he will focus on data manipulation and visualization, text mining, and GIS applications that enhance the historical record and increase the visibility and discoverability of DLAS.

Azure Stewart (New York University) received her Ph.D. in Education with a specialization in Teaching and Learning from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Reporting to the Head of Science and Engineering at NYU Libraries, she will work at the intersection of engineering education, librarianship, and research. She will develop a new co-curricular program to improve engineering students’ professional skills and collaborate on the development of workshops, seminars, and grant proposals that support this new program. Stewart will also develop an assessment that measures the effectiveness of the program.

Sean Tennant (Union College) received his Ph.D. in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia, with a concentration in Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, he will work with Union College Library staff and faculty to develop workflows for the creation, use, preservation, and retrieval of data from disciplines across the academic spectrum. He will also advise faculty and students on best and sustainable practices to ensure accessibility, discoverability, and reproducibility of their datasets.

Kimber Thomas (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Studies, she will collaborate with communities, archivists, librarians, and researchers to facilitate the preservation and potential use of data collected from the Community-Driven Archives Project, an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports historically underrepresented history keepers in telling, sharing, and preserving their stories. A scholar of southern studies, her interdisciplinary research interests include material culture, rural black women’s history, and oral history, and involve exploring, examining, and preserving  through digital technologies the aesthetic and cultural worlds of African Americans in the American Deep South.

Kevin Winstead (University of Delaware) earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland. As Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation, he will work with the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) to implement and supervise new, multi-institutional partnerships for gathering documents, organizing research data, and sharing metadata related to the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions. Working with the head of the digital archives committee, Winstead will coordinate CCP undergraduate and graduate student project work in data curation. He will also organize yearly workshops or panel discussions about data curation and its importance for Black communities for and in conjunction with local community archives and groups.

Emily Beagle (University of Texas at Austin) received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wyoming. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Energy Economics, she will work jointly with UT Libraries staff and Energy Institute faculty to integrate and manage large, multi-component data sets for energy systems. Her work specifically involves residential electricity data paired with other geographic and demographic information to assess how electricity demand changes with location and meteorology. In addition to managing these data sets, she will work to make them available to other researchers and support open science.

Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra (Smith College) earned her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. As Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Coordinator in Digital Humanities and Popular Political Education, she will develop the project Putting History in Domestic Workers’ Hands. In collaboration with historians and organizers from Smith College and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), she will produce research on domestic worker history and create digitally-based products to support key elements of NDWA’s capacity-building initiatives, including building a greater web presence for NDWA through web-based educational videos and developing a core political education curriculum that is digitally-distributable for curation and use on multiple scales.

Heidi Dodson (University at Buffalo) received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship, she will work with constituencies across campus to understand current digital scholarship needs and plan and implement effective strategies for meeting those needs.  She will collaborate with librarians, faculty, and students to support innovative teaching and research through open scholarship, the development of digital projects, and the effective use of data. By strengthening and expanding digital scholarship networks across campus, she will ensure the library continues to be a transformative space for knowledge production.

Seth Erickson (Pennsylvania State University) received his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, he will lead an investigation into software curation services at Penn State University Libraries. Building on the libraries’ established digital preservation and data curation programs, he will work on conceptualizing and developing software curation services by addressing challenges associated with the acquisition, licensing, description, accessibility, and preservation of research software.

Jennifer Garcon (University of Pennsylvania) received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami. As Community and Public Data Curation Fellow, she will help develop and expand sustainable models for the care of vulnerable collections of data. She will work on the Data Refuge project, a data initiative aimed at the identification and long-term preservation of environmental and climate data published by local, state, and federal governments. She will also partner with faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education in building an archive of Black Philly that will help care for vulnerable data published by members of the Black community in Philadelphia, especially in neighborhoods that are rapidly changing due to gentrification and other forces. 

Zenobie S. Garrett (University of Oklahoma) received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Software and Research Objects Curation, she will conduct research in digital archiving and software curation for virtual reality and 3D imaging applications. She will work closely with staff from the university libraries as well as faculty and students to develop and incorporate best practices and standards of digital data curation and preservation in research, teaching, and learning. She will also promote collaborative projects using 3D and VR technology throughout the university and teach and train students, staff, and faculty on the significance of software integrity, transparency, and ethics. Her goal is to facilitate the development and use of innovative digital technologies in research and scholarship.

Jennifer Isasi (University of Texas at Austin) earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in Latin American and Latina/o Studies, Isasi will work with Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert A. Palacios to contribute to “collections as data” efforts, educational resources, and digital scholarship initiatives at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. She will also work with academic engagement staff, affiliated faculty, the post-custodial archival team, and partners in the United States and Latin America to develop curated data sets, open-access resources that support scholarly and public engagement with digital materials, and to inform the development of forthcoming digital collections.

Andrew Meade McGee (Carnegie Mellon University) received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. A historian of the politics, technology, business, and culture of the twentieth century U.S. information society, he previously served as visiting faculty at Carnegie Mellon (CMU) and Washington and Lee University and most recently held the Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress. As Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science and Computing at CMU, he will promote research in the history of information technology and foster cross-campus ties among humanities scholars, scientists, and artists. He will digitally curate and design public history presentations around CMU’s newly acquired Pamela McCorduck Collection of rare computing books, letters, and artifacts, fostering broader campus discussion around history of science and technology materials held in the University Library Archives and Special Collections.

Nicté Fuller Medina (University of California, Los Angeles) earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she will help re-envision the Latin American and Caribbean Studies collection strategies for data acquired and held in support of teaching, research, and community outreach and engagement. She will articulate and guide the development of multilingual interfaces to UCLA’s highly diverse web-based content and collections to enable easy use and the broadest possible discovery of content and services by international scholars.

Margie Montañez (University of New Mexico) received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she will help bridge gaps in the North/South information divide as part of the faculty in the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences, with an affiliation in the Latin American and Iberian Institute. Working with digitized and born digital documents, data and metadata, and a variety of historical texts, including maps, personal and professional correspondence, political and legal records, and travel and shipping logs, she will develop initiatives that enhance collections and scholarship while implementing equitable and culturally sensitive Latin American and Caribbean projects in data curation and digital humanities. Her work will traverse the changing political boundaries of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean while improving online access to collections, data, and metadata between the Americas.

Smiti Nathan (Johns Hopkins University) earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus on Archaeology from New York University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Geospatial Data Discovery, Access, Management, and Curation in Data Services at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries and Museums, she will curate library collections of geospatial data and make them more accessible to users while supporting users in managing and sharing their own geospatial research.

Hyeongyul Roh (Duke University) received his Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Data Curation, he will work closely with energy economists, engineers, and other faculty affiliated with the Duke University Energy Initiative’s Energy Data Analytics Lab and in the Libraries’ Brandeleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services. As new energy data sets emerge, he will identify valuable energy data resources and design and conduct data analysis and modeling experiments using the large data sets. He will also work on energy projects involving regression analysis, classification, and other forms of machine learning; design and implement optimization analyses; data visualization and narrative construction; and data sharing and management for broad dissemination of research findings. 

Jonathan Scott (University of California, Berkeley) received his Ph.D. in Economics from Texas A&M University. His research interests span industrial organization and public economics, and primarily focus on energy and environmental issues. His recent research has examined environmental externalities produced by the energy and transportation sectors, with an emphasis on policy-driven solutions. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Data Visualization and Curation for the Energy Institute at Haas and the University Library at the University of California, Berkeley, he will explore new techniques in data visualization, storytelling with data, and the creation of original and innovative scholarship in support of energy research and other forms of data-intensive science.

Justin D. Shanks (Montana State University) earned his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech. As CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, he will develop a digital humanities program that builds upon institutional interdisciplinary strengths in western American literature and history. Using the Ivan Doig Archive as a foundation, Justin will collaborate with Montana State University Library and the Center for Western Lands and Peoples to foster the growth of digital humanities education and research at Montana State University. He will develop courses and conduct research that increases awareness of and builds institutional capacity in digital humanities methods and research in order to integrate MSU into the larger community of digital humanities scholarship.

Hadassah St. Hubert (Florida International University) received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she will lead programming and digitization efforts in collaboration with the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s (dLOC’s) partner, L’Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN). In this cooperative project, she will provide training and expert technical assistance to ISPAN in its digitization efforts. In addition, she will increase access to and preserve Haitian information resources at ISPAN by digitizing archives, mapping sites, and making the archive available in English, French, and Haitian Creole.

Rachel Starry (University at Buffalo) received her Ph.D. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for the Social Sciences, she will partner with the university libraries and various departments and research centers in the College of Arts and Sciences to identify social science data needs and opportunities across campus. Coordinating with ongoing digital scholarship initiatives, she will provide instruction and guidance on geospatial data concerns, tools and approaches for data analysis, standards for dataset preservation and publication, and ways to leverage existing social science datasets. She will also collaborate with campus centers such as the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Center for Unified Biometrics to support new and existing digital projects in the social sciences.

Ana Trisovic (University of Chicago) earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. She previously worked as project associate on data preservation and research reproducibility at the high-energy physics laboratory CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. During her fellowship, she will work with the University of Chicago Library and the university’s Energy Policy Institute to design and develop a data system for storing and sharing data on energy, environmental, and climate research to facilitate future data analysis. She will also work on software development, data curation solutions, and data management programs for energy research. Her research interests focus on data provenance, scientific preservation and reproducibility, data analysis automation and reuse, and open science.

Wendy Hoi Yan Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) earned her Ph.D. in Music from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and her M.S. in Library and Information Science at the iSchool of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship, she will be a member of the library’s Research Support & Digital Initiatives Team. Wong will assist in developing the digital scholarship research environment on campus by offering workshops on digital tools and giving advice to faculty and students as needed. She will collaborate with faculty on digital humanities projects using the library’s special collections on Hong Kong literature and Chinese music.

Qian Zhang (University of Waterloo) earned her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, with a major in Physical Oceanography and a minor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before joining the University of Waterloo, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Data Service of the library, iSchool and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation with a joint appointment between the library and the School of Computer Science, she will conduct a comprehensive exploration of the scope and current practice of software curation globally with an emphasis on practices in Canada to help inform the development of library services.