MESH is, like its title suggests, a fabric of connections among researchers, faculty, and support staff within and across the digital scholarly publishing community. As such, MESH has a core group of collaborators as well as with other colleagues and researchers from MSU and beyond enabling us to call upon a variety of areas of expertise as needed for projects and initiatives. The core MESH team includes the following individuals:
Leadership Team
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Director of MESH, College of Arts and Letters
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is project director of Humanities Commons. She is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she also directs MESH Research. Prior to joining the MSU faculty, she was Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. Fitzpatrick is author of three books, including Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011). She was also lead author of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (MLA, 2016). She is president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources, and she serves on the advisory boards for numerous projects related to open scholarly communication and infrastructure.
Kelly Sattler
Associate Director of MESH, MSU Libraries
Scott Schopieray
Associate Director of MESH, College of Arts and Letters
Scott Schopieray is Assistant Dean for Academic and Research Technology in the College of Arts & Letters at MSU, where he also serves as Associate Director of MESH. In his position, he works to support digital infrastructure and methods for teaching, learning, and research across the arts and humanities. His current research areas are in high-impact/high-quality online teaching methods, faculty motivation to teach online, and processes for open digital scholarly publishing.
Brian Adams
Associate Director for Technology, College of Arts and Letters
Brian Adams is Associate Director for Technology of MESH Research, where he oversees the development of MESH projects and manages the Humanities Commons technical team. Adams has served as lead developer within the College of Arts & Letters at MSU for the last ten years, where he has been instrumental to building numerous research and instructional projects.
Contributing Faculty & Staff
Brian Boggan
Information Technologist II, College of Arts and Letters
Brian Boggan is the Commons’ identity management engineer. He has an undergraduate degree in Networking and Cybersecurity specializing in Network Technology. He brings years of experience in enterprise access, network, and application support. Before joining the Commons team, he managed high-level public facing applications for the State of Michigan – Department of Health and Human Services.
Grant Eben
Information Technologist I, College of Arts and Letters
Ian Edwards
Kristen Lee
Discovery Services, MSU Libraries
Lucas Mak
Metadata Strategies & Technologies, MSU Libraries
Emilia Marcyk-Taylor
Head of Discovery Services, MSU Libraries Discovery Services Team
Kristen Mapes
Assistant Director of Digital Humanities, College of Arts & Letters
Bonnie Russell
Project Manager, The Commons and MESH; Digital Specialist, HuMetricsHSS
Bonnie Russell is the product manager for the Commons, working in close communication with both the technical and the community teams. Ms. Russell is a librarian with a focus on information management, user experience design, and technical project management. She is an affiliated faculty member in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University and serves as the digital specialist for HuMetricsHSS. Most recently she co-authored the OER Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication with support from the Scholarly Communication Notebook.
Ian Scott
Information Technologist I, College of Arts and Letters
Ian Scott is the Python developer leading work on the Knowledge Commons Repository. Ian comes from an academic background in Religious Studies and Digital Humanities, and he has held faculty positions at Tyndale University and the University of Western Ontario. He has a longstanding passion for open research and for the potential of web technologies to make scholarship more just and accessible. He was co-director of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha and is a member of the technical committee for the Distributed Text Services API standard. Prior to joining the Commons team, he developed an eLearning application for students of ancient Greek.
Michael Thicke
Information Technologist II, College of Arts and Letters
Michael Thicke is the lead developer on the Humanities Commons project. He is a philosopher of science, social epistemologist, and web developer, having received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the Commons team, Thicke was the developer of WP Museum, a WordPress plugin for managing an online museum in WordPress, which is used by the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection.
Dimitris Tzouris
Information Technologist I, College of Arts and Letters
Dimitris Tzouris is our infrastructure developer. He comes to the Commons team from the American College of Thessaloniki, where he developed extensive experience as an instructional technologist. Tzouris has an undergraduate degree in Computer Management Information Systems and has delivered talks and workshops on educational technology at numerous international events. He has served as a member of the coordinating committee of AMICAL, the American International Consortium of Academic Libraries, advising on social media and learning technologies. Tzouris also founded Global Game Jam Thessaloniki and has served as a member of the TEDxThessaloniki team.
Stephanie Vasko
UX Researcher, College of Arts and Letters
Stephanie Vasko, Ph.D., is a Senior User Experience Researcher in the College of Arts and Letters Dean’s Office and Mesh Research at Michigan State University. She works with a variety of functional and cross-functional teams, facilitates discussion around design and collaboration, and conducts qualitative and quantitative user research. Prior to this position, she was the managing director for MSU Center for Interdisciplinary.
Dave Ventresca
Information Technologist I, College of Arts and Letters
Shel Vilag
Information Technologist I, MSU Libraries
Zoe Wake Hyde
Community Development Manager, HCommons
Zoe Wake Hyde is the Commons’ community development manager. She has been working towards transformational change in education and research since 2015, and has a background in publishing and communications across post-secondary institutions in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Prior to joining the Commons, she led projects to develop collaborative open textbook publishing and open humanities research processes. She also serves on the LPC’s Ethical Publishing Taskforce and is Board President of Hands On Media Education, a Canadian non-profit organisation teaching digital literacy through media creation.
Penny Weber
Project Manager, HuMetricsHSS
- Emilia Breuning
- Emily Paterson
- Grace Turner
- Zhanna Yakubova
Sponsors
- Christopher Long, Dean, College of Arts and Letters
Alumni
- Christine Bennett, GA, 2020–2021
- Shelby Brewster, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ), College of Arts and Letters 2020-2023
- Scout Calvert, Data Librarian, MSU Libraries
- Alana Carl, Undergraduate Assistant, 2020-2021
- Vicky Chen, 2022
- Robin Dean, Digital Projects Librarian, MSU Libraries
- Sruthin Gaddam, Information Technologist II, MSU Libraries
- Amaresh Joshi, Information Technologist II, IT Services 2020-2023
- Shannon Kelly, GA, 2020–2021
- Susan Kendall, Copyright Librarian, MSU Libraries
- Katherine Knowles, GA, 2021-22
- Megan Kudzia, Digital Humanities Librarian, MSU Libraries 2020-2023
- Kurt Milberger, PPJ Editor, Colleges of Arts and Letters 2020-2023
- Taylor Mills, GA, 2019–2021
- June Oh, GA, 2019–2020
- Joseph Salem, Dean of University Libraries
- Megan Schanz, Information Technologist II, MSU Libraries
- Jessica Stokes, GA, 2019-2020
- Christine Tobias, Head of Discovery Services, MSU Libraries and the entire Discovery Services Team
In Memoriam
Amaresh Joshi
Information Technologist II, IT Services
Amaresh Joshi was an information systems designer and programmer in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. He was also also a PhD candidate in linguistics at MSU, with interests in syntax, semantics and computational linguistics. He is greatly missed.
