Rebecca Bryant, Ph.D.

Senior Program Officer

Rebecca leads and develops areas for the OCLC Research Library Partnership and for OCLC Research related to research information management and research support services, contributing to the thematic focus on Research Collections and Support.

Rebecca previously served as Project Manager for Researcher Information Services in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. There, she led a campus-wide effort to implement the Elsevier Pure research information management system (RIMS), rebranded locally as Illinois Research Connections. She also served as Director of Community at ORCID, where she led outreach initiatives to encourage the adoption of ORCID identifiers throughout the scholarly communications community, particularly promoting adoption and integration within universities worldwide.

Prior to ORCID, Rebecca spent a decade in the University of Illinois Graduate College as Assistant Dean, where she led numerous initiatives to support early career researchers, including the establishment of campus-wide graduate career services and postdoctoral affairs offices. She also served on a campus-wide project team to collect assessment data from 62 Ph.D. programs for the National Research Council Assessment of Research Doctoral Programs. She has extensive experience defining and launching new technology initiatives within the research university setting, including Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) and serving as a project leader on the system-wide Banner ERP implementation team at Illinois.

Rebecca earned a bachelor’s degree at Butler University, a master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.