William A. “Bill” Ingram is Associate Professor at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Associate Dean and Executive Director of Information Technology for the University Libraries and Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech (2026), an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008), and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia (2005). His research applies natural language processing and machine learning to digital libraries and scholarly communication, much of it centered on electronic theses and dissertations. His dissertation developed methods for evaluating how the graduate research in ETDs contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Since 2019 he has led IMLS-funded research on computational access to ETD collections. The first project, Opening Books and the National Corpus of Graduate Research (2019–2022, with co-PIs Edward A. Fox and Jian Wu), applied machine and deep learning to a large corpus of theses and dissertations. The current project, Harnessing ETDs: Pioneering AI-Driven Innovations in Library Service (2024–2027), integrates ETD collections with large language models to prototype tools for information discovery and research assistance. He is also co-PI of an IMLS study of ETD accessibility for blind and low-vision users (2024–2025). He has served on the NDLTD Board of Directors since 2019 and is an associate editor of the Journal of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (J-ETD).
- Homepage: https://waingram.github.io/
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8307-8844
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waingram/
- GitHub: https://github.com/waingram