The Center for the History of Medicine is delighted to announce that Rebecca Thayer joined the staff in March. In the role of Processing Archivist, Rebecca will arrange and describe collections using archival description standards as well as local best practices for inclusive and conscientious description of medical collections. She will also contribute to the Center’s ongoing efforts to refine and document their processing practices. Rebecca is currently working on processing the papers of Frederick P. Li, a cancer epidemiologist who held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health). Next up will be the papers of pediatric pulmonologist Mary Ellen Wohl.

Rebecca comes to the Center from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she was the Project Archivist for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant project to process the papers of economist James M. Buchanan. She also worked at the College of Charleston in South Carolina on the SC LGBTQ Archives, Oral Histories, and Outreach project preserving the history of LGBTQ people and organizations in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Since 2019, she has served on the committee for the Society of American Archivists annual Research Forum.

Rebecca holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from University of Maryland, College Park, where she also worked as a processing student. She also completed internships at the Library of Congress and the Department of Justice Antitrust Library. Rebecca received her Bachelor of Arts in International Languages and Cultures: Chinese from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Please join us in welcoming Rebecca to Countway and to Harvard!