NEH-Project Team

Leadership

Viviana Grieco, Ph.D. Professor of History and Latin American and Latinx Studies, University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC).

Praveen Rao, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Health Management & Informatics/Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of Missouri-Columbia (MU).

Research Assistants:

Ms. Shraboni Sarker, full-time graduate research assistant in College of Engineering (MU).

Mr. Adam Cardenas Sisk, full-time graduate research assistant. Department of Spanish (UMKC).

Ms. Shraboni Sarker, full-time graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Mr. Hulayyi Alshammari, full-time graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Mr. Chandrasekhar Syamala, full-time graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Mr. Parshad Suthar, graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Past Research Assistants:

Dr. Nouf Alrasheed, full-time graduate research assistant in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (UMKC) She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Tabuk in Saudi Arabia.

Ms. Victoria Dominguez, undergraduate research assistant. Department of Spanish (UMKC).

Ms. Shivika Prasanna, full-time graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Ms. Pooja Purushatma, graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering (MU).

Mr. Parshad Suthar, graduate research assistant in College of Engineering (MU).

Ms. Nouf Alrasheed, full-time graduate research assistant in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (UMKC).

Mr. Adam Cardenas Sisk, full-time graduate research assistant. Department of Spanish (UMKC).

Consultants:

Ms. Belén Callegarich, M.A. Director, Division of Written Documents, Archivo General de la Nación Argentina.

David Freeman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History (UMKC).

Mr. Ryan Rowland. Spanish Language Consultant.

Martin Wasserman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History. Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina and researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina (UBA – CONICET).

Awards:

2023. Nouf Alrasheed was awarded MIDE’s “Student Spotlight Award”for her outstanding work related to this project. The award highlights five core values: Gritty Innovation; Research Integrity; Teamwork; Confident Humility; and Passion.

Skillset:

Prof. Grieco is a native Spanish speaker who specializes in colonial Latin American history. She has received extensive training in paleography and diplomatics in Argentina and in Spain and, for the last two decades, has conducted research in Spanish and Spanish American archives.

Prof. Rao is an expert in the areas of big data and knowledge management and machine learning/deep learning. He brings forth the required technical expertise to develop new techniques for knowledge graph construction and the software tool using open-source technologies.

Dr. Freeman and Dr. Wasserman have extensively worked with the seventeenth century notary records housed at the Archivo General de Nación in Argentina and contribute to this project with their archival and paleographic expertise.

Ms. Belén Callegarich holds degrees in history and archival sciences. At the National Archives, she is in charge of identifying, classifying, and describing documentation produced during the colonial period. She brings to this project her understanding of the processes involved in the production of colonial documents as well as her archival and paleographic expertise.

Ms. Nouf Alrasheed is doctoral student in UMKC’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and has the technical skills and programming knowledge to complete the tasks of this project.

Ms. Shraboni Sarker and Ms. Shivika Prasanna are doctoral students in MU's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and have the technical skills and programming knowledge to complete the tasks of this project. Ms. Sarker brings to this project her expertise in NLP (Natural Language Processing).

Ms. Victoria Dominguez, Mr. Adam Cardenas Sisk and Mr. Ryan Rowland are fluent in Spanish and have been trained to read and label seventeenth century Spanish American scripts.

Ms. Pooja Purushatma and Mr. Parshad Suthar are master’s students in MU's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and have the technical skills and programming knowledge to complete the tasks of this project. They contribute with their expertise in machine learning and knowledge graphs.

Mr. Hulayyi Alshammari is a doctoral student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. With a master's degree in computer science, he brings to this project his expertise in machine learning and big data.

Mr. Chandrasekhar Syamala is a master’s student in Computer Science at SDS Lab at the University of Missouri's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He brings to this project his proficiency in modern programming languages, machine learning, and big data processing. He will work on the scalability aspects of this project including the knowledge graph generation and document retrieval from a cloud computing setup.