Tara McCurley has been appointed to the position of assistant director of academic technologies. In her previous role she was the coordinator of the Computing Center at Cox Hall before stepping into her current role on an interim basis last year.
In her new position, Tara manages Student Digital Life (SDL) and serves on the ATS management team with Lee Clontz, the head of Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT), and Kim Braxton, the director of ATS. Tara’s role is to help guide the future services and current operations of ATS.
Tara now manages the entire SDL offering, which includes the Computing Center, TechLab, EaglePrint, Student Tech Support, the Learning Commons, MediaLab, and the Student Production Studio.
“I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with the members of Student Digital Life for years,” said Tara. “We have a good rapport. The opportunity to manage this excellent group of employees was an exciting challenge for me.”
Before her time at Emory, Tara was a teacher in Westport, CT. A graduate of Yale with a bachelor’s degree in economics, Tara is originally from Mechanicsburg, PA.
Tara used to be a professional ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet and the Miami City Ballet. She also spends time with her 14-year old daughter and her dog.
Tara has a strong vision for what she wants to do in this role. “In this rapidly changing technology landscape, the college students of tomorrow are already doing things like creating their own YouTube channels and podcasting. It will be crucial for us to have the right spaces to accommodate these students while also maintaining the integrity of the needs of Emory today,” said Tara. “The Computing Center, while currently being wildly successful, will nonetheless need to transition to fill the gaps, especially once the new campus life center opens.”
She added, “We will need to communicate with students to find out what they need but are not getting, with faculty to find out what they would like to do but can’t, and then find the resources in our organization to make this happen.”
You can reach her at tmccurl [at] emory [dot] edu.
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