With great pleasure, I write to announce two wonderful additions to the Scholars’ Lab team!

Purdom Lindblad will join us on December 30th as our much-anticipated Head of Scholars’ Lab Graduate Programs (including, among other programs, Praxis and the Praxis Network), and Laura Miller will shortly take on a dual position coordinating public programs in the SLab and assisting me with strategic planning for digital humanities in the UVa Provost’s office.

Purdom comes to us from Virginia Tech, where she works as the College Librarian for Humanities and Digital Humanities. There, she has radically expanded DH project support and programming, organized graduate student open-access events, and helped to establish Port, Tech’s digital research commons. Purdom has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Her current course on Religion in America involves students in an interactive exhibit in the library. She is active at the Byron Society of America, is co-PI of an ACH micro-grant project to produce dm4dh, a blog and podcast on data management in the humanities, and studied at Doshisha University in Kyoto as the winner of a distinguished Monbukagakusho scholarship. Purdom holds an MA in American Studies from Michigan State University (where she worked at MATRIX, MSU’s digital humanities center) and an MS in Information from the University of Michigan. Purdom describes herself as an open access advocate, an “abuser of exclamation points, and a knitter (stereotype!).”

Laura Miller comes to the Department of Digital Research & Scholarship from a central role as Assistant to the Director in UVa’s Brown Science and Engineering Library, where she provided public service, outreach, and research instruction, project management, and user needs assessment for both space and interface design. Last year, she coordinated a successful Learning Spaces Renewal Project across four of UVa’s libraries. Laura is also co-creator of the Library’s data management portal for UVa graduate students, and recently presented on the subject at a J-term Data Management Bootcamp for Grad Students (a partnership with Virginia Tech). Laura holds a BA in English from William and Mary and an MS in Library and Information Science from Florida State. She has a past life in science-fiction book publishing and her research interests include usability and iterative, user-centered design. Laura also reports an interest in “quirky podcasts, negotiating with a three year-old, and live music of (almost) any sort.”

Staff, students, and collaborating faculty in the SLab are hugely excited about the transformative impact Laura and Purdom will have on our work. I hope you will join me in welcoming them!