Elizabeth DuRoss Liddy, dean emerita of the School of Information Science (iSchool) at Syracuse University in New York, passed away on August 21. She was 81 years old.
After earning her master’s degree in library science from Syracuse’s iSchool, Dr. Liddy began her career in academia as the faculty librarian at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse. In 1982, she was accepted as the iSchool’s first part-time Ph.D. student, ultimately earning her degree six years later.
As a scholar, Dr. Liddy focused on natural language processing. Her research led to eight technology patents and more than 100 publications regarding information extraction search, data mining, question-answering, and cross-language retrieval and summarization. At Syracuse, she founded the Center for Natural Language Processing, as well as a startup company, TextWise.
In 2008, Dr. Liddy was named dean of the iSchool. During her tenure, undergraduate enrollment grew by 71 percent, graduate enrollment grew by 66 percent, and new academic programs were developed in data science and data analytics. Under her leadership, the school raised more than $26 million in research funding.
During the 2015-2016 academic year, Dr. Liddy was selected to serve as interim vice chancellor and provost. In this role, she developed the university’s first academic strategic plan. She returned to her deanship the following year and retired from the university in 2019.