Michael Morris-Pearce moves on and up to Oregon

As many of you know, Michael Morris-Pearce is moving to Portland.  Michael has been with CDL for just over a year but in that time he’s made a lot of important contributions.  One of those contributions was completely revising the interlibrary loan reports we provide to campuses.  In doing this work, Michael brought his user-centered design approach which was a big hit with our campus partners.  As a result, he is leaving us with both better report programs and better campus relations.

As those who attended last week’s TechX know, Michael also led D2D’s first machine learning project.  His work on finding duplicates in the Zephir catalog is an important step in helping us lower costs for Zephir contributors (including UC) and offers a way forward in finding duplicates in other catalogs.

In addition to these projects, Michael has worked on our ILL system and has contributed many good ideas both to our agile process and to our effort to create a continuous integration process.  He has also taught us about Jupyter Notebooks, Scikit and new methods of unit testing.

Most of all Michael has been a fun person to work with.  Everyone who has had a chance to have lunch with him, play chess with him or learn a little bit about ultimate Frisbee® from him will back me up in that.  All of us in D2D will miss him and we all wish him the best as he starts his new life in Portland.