Giant Leaps - Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Speakers

Heidi Arbisi-Kelm is the Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs in the Graduate College at the University of Iowa, where she oversees thesis and dissertation administration, graduate degree progress and clearance, and student case management for all master’s and doctoral degree students on campus. Prior to working at the University of Iowa, she worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UCLA.

Tony Bushner is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition who studies digital rhetoric, professional writing, and games and teaches a multimedia composition course that focuses on board game accessibility, production, and crowdfunding. Their dissertation focuses on board games and their reliance on technical documentation to ensure games are played as closely as possible to the original vision of the designer.

Carly Dearborn is the Digital Preservation and Electronic Records Archivist at Purdue University Archives and Special Collections where she is responsible for the appraisal, description, and preservation of the University’s unique digital collections of high research value. Dearborn’s research interests include distributed digital preservation, personal digital archiving, and transparency in the digital preservation field.

Kathryn Henke Evans is the Visual Resources Librarian for the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue Univeristy, and she is a visual artist working in diverse media such as video, video and sound installation, collaborative performance, painting and works on paper. She also has extensive experience in video documentation of performance work, creating materials for art and dance pedagogy, collaborative video projects, camera operation for sports events and studio production.

Martin Halbert is the Dean of University Libraries and Professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Dr. Halbert was previously the Dean of Libraries at the University of North Texas and worked at Emory University, Rice University, and IBM. He co-founded the Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative, and Library Publishing Coalition. Halbert’s research and initiatives have been sponsored by agencies such as the IMLS, NEH, Mellon Foundation, NDIIP, NSF, and the National Historic Publications and Records Commission.

Matthew Hannah is an Assistant Professor of Library Science and Digital Humanities (DH) at the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in American Studies. His research focuses on text analysis, network theory, and DH, and he is collaborating on a new DH certificate and building a Digital Humanities Studio. His current project involves measuring and comparing literary style in 19th and 20th-century British literature.

Jean-Pierre Hérubel is a Professor of Library Science at the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies. His research explores historiography, disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies, disciplinary cultures of the humanities, and mapping published scholarship, via bibliometrics. He has published a number of studies on doctoral studies and dissertations as indicators of disciplinary acculturation. Among other works, Dr. Hérubel authored The Doctor of Philosophy Degree: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography.

Ashlee Messersmith is the Thesis & Dissertation Manager for the Purdue Graduate School where she oversees and conducts final approval of all thesis deposits and provides a variety of support to Graduate Students. She lead a recent initiative to rewrite thesis and dissertation policies for the Graduate School allowing students the opportunity to deposit their theses in formats beyond the PDF. She is an advocate of Open Access and manages the Hammer Research Repository (HammerRR), which uses Figshare for Institutions as the university's thesis and graduate directed project repository.

James Mohler the Associate Dean of the Graduate School and a Professor of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University. Dr. Mohler is a Faculty Scholar, a member of the Purdue University Teaching Academy and a past faculty fellow for the Discovery Learning Center. He has authored, co-authored, or contributed to over 21 texts related to computer graphics and media development and over 71 articles for refereed, reviewed, or trade publications.

Justin Race is the director of the Purdue University Press and the Scholarly Publishing Services unit of the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, which includes the Purdue e-Pubs open access, digital document repository. He has more than 15 years of experience in scholarly publishing both in both commercial and university markets. Before joining Purdue Libraries, Race was the director of the University of Nevada Press and worked at Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group as well as writing and editing for the Tufts Observer student newspaper.

Michael Witt is an Associate Professor of Library Science and the Head of the Distributed Data Curation Center of the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies. Professor Witt has collaborated and lead initiatives that seek to apply library science principles to challenges in the curation of research data such as re3data.org, the Purdue University Research Repository, the DMPTool, and the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit.

Lydia Utley is a Research Analyst in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program. She provides geographic information systems (GIS) and data management support for several research and Extension projects. Her works involves conducting spatial analysis, managing enterprise databases, and assisting research lab groups with data analysis needs.

Laura Zanotti is an environmental anthropologist and interdisciplinary social scientist who partners with communities to examine how local, mostly rural, livelihoods and well-being can be sustained and to identify the pathways that shape just futures. She joined the Purdue Faculty in 2009 and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Center for the Environment. She belongs to the Critical Data Studies Collective and is an affiliate faculty in the American Studies, Human Rights, and Latin American and Latino Studies programs and certificates on campus.