Vika Zafrin Email & Phone Number

Boston, MA, US

Cambridge, MA, US

Guiding ever more complex, long-term projects to help make Akamai more secure. Currently working with teams in the areas of governance, risks, and compliance; customer facing system hardening; and enterprise facing metrics. Have wrapped up work around high value systems protection and endpoint detection & response.

Cambridge, MA, US

Embarked on a new adventure in Akamai’s Information Security division, and then the newly created InfoSec Program Management Office. Guided large scale InfoSec-IT collaborations that further secure our environment. Co-created highly flexible and cross functional workflows with my PMO colleagues. Moved things forward.

• Co-led principal U.S.-based scholarly association for digital humanities, in operation since 1978.
• Organized 16-person, all-volunteer Executive Board meetings in person annually at international conferences, and online throughout the year.
• Successfully implemented new wiki working space, enabling management of historical records and introducing efficiencies into current work.
• Served on technical infrastructure working group.
• Served on national and international Coordinating Committees for annual conferences attracting 400-900 attendees.
• http://www.ach.org/

Boston, MA, US

• Inaugural head of BU Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Services department.
• Taught technical and conceptual digital scholarship fundamentals to non-technical audiences.
• Led conceptual and staff development; supported over 30 complex and diverse digital scholarship projects.
• Oversaw institutional digital repository (over 5M human-initiated downloads by 2020).
• Helped pass and implemented a university-wide open access policy for scholarly articles, spurring along university-wide scholarly publishing culture change for the benefit of society.
• http://www.bu.edu/disc

Boston, MA, US

• Advised VP for Information Services & Technology on funding and development priorities for services to over 30,000 constituents as part of Support & Infrastructure (2010-2014) and Research Computing (2014-2020).

Boston, MA, US

• Co-taught with Jason Prentice CC220, Digital Core: Genesis. Led undergraduate students through a deep scholarly dive into a literary work using XML as a tool for close reading.
• https://bulib.github.io/dcgenesis/

Boston, MA, US

• Inaugural manager of university digital repository.
• Oversaw technical development of underlying open-source software and eventual outsourcing to third-party vendor, with an eye to efficiency and scalability.
• Wrote technical documentation.
• Implemented metadata best practices, ensuring global interoperability.
• Accessioned over 14,000 items of content.
• Operational lead on university's transition to all-electronic submission of over 700 graduate theses and dissertations annually.

Boston, MA, US

• Co-PI on a project funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant.
• Convened a group of humanities scholars, librarians, and computational analysis experts to consider how to improve existing cataloging software that attempts to better classify interdisciplinary humanities research.
• Co-wrote final white paper deliverable.
• http://tinyurl.com/nehodh-bu

Boston, MA, US

• Inaugurated position at BU School of Theology.
• Developed digital resources; created a culture allowing the creation of more, totaling over a dozen to date.
• Consulted and taught workshops on digital research and pedagogy; oversaw digitization.
• Supported over 130 desktop computers plus peripherals. By end of tenure, successfully argued for the separation of this function from digital collections librarian position, increasing effectiveness of both.

• Semester-long courses and guest lectures in Italian, digital humanities, and digital research methods at undergraduate, graduate, and continuing professional education levels.
• Led workshops region-wide on digital humanities, XML, regular expressions, humanistic research data, copyright, open access, funding, grant writing, scholarly uses of social media, electronic thesis and dissertation.
• Created audience-aware, highly effective classroom environments for over a thousand learners.

Naples, Florida, US

• Consulted on development of the Archive and its community aspects, taking into account its user base and long-term goals.
• https://www.readex.com/content/archive-americana

Providence, Rhode Island, US

• Co-designed new web interface for the peer-reviewed, online-only journal of the AmericanBoccaccio Association, serving scholars since 1974. The site was static, stable, and lightweight; the design was in continuous use.
• http://heliotropia.org/

Providence, Rhode Island, US

• Worked closely with PI Massimo Riva and team of scholars and developers on innovative, NEH-funded humanities computing project.
• Oversaw two major semantic text encoding undertakings, teaching traditionally trained humanities scholars pioneering research methods.
• Designed and implemented project's first web interface.
• Maintained contact with colleagues across four countries on two continents. Managed public relations.
• Co-wrote federal grant reports and other documentation.
• https://www.brown.edu/academics/italian-studies/research-and-publications/virtual-humanities-lab-vhl

Providence, Rhode Island, US

• Co-organized and co-ran International Humanities Computing Seminar hosting ~50.
• Translated all Italian-language abstract submissions into English.
• During the conference, served as live interpreter from Italian to English during presentations,enabling a dozen of the ~50 attendees to participate fully.

Providence, Rhode Island, US

• Semantically encoded text in SGML and XML for one of the longest continuously operating humanistic projects online.
• Served as webmaster; collaborated on technical and content organization aspects of complete website redesign.
• Assisted in creation of experimental semantic search engines.
• https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/

Boston, MA, US

• Developed and implemented extensive FileMaker Pro relational database in close collaboration with the Field Placement Office, which at the time placed almost 1000 students annually and was affiliated with over 800.
• Ported data from FoxPro.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Special Graduate Studies (Humanities Computing)

Master Of Arts (M.A.), Italian Studies

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Italian, Theater

Education record

Education record

Education record