Several new administrators have joined the University of Virginia School of Law to enhance the academic and student experience.
Jennifer Echemendia is the assistant director of the Graduate Studies Program. Previously, Echemendia lived in the United Kingdom for several years, where she qualified as a solicitor of England and Wales in 2018. She then worked for several years at a firm in Cambridgeshire, focusing her practice on trust and estate matters.
Scott Gavin is a staff attorney at the Innocence Project. He previously worked as a lead attorney at Capital Collateral Regional Counsel-South in Florida, where he represented death row inmates in both state and federal post-conviction appeals.
Kim Gilmer is director of judicial clerkships. Her legal career has focused primarily on civil rights advocacy and education, including serving as a staff attorney with a public interest organization, operating her own solo practice law firm, and providing legal research and consultation to other firms and clients. Gilmer earned her J.D. at Stanford Law School and clerked for U.S. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III ’72.
GeDá Jones Herbert is the inaugural director of programming for the Education Rights Institute. She previously worked for four years as education special counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Before joining LDF, Jones Herbert was an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.
Melissa Scheeren joined the Arthur J. Morris Law Library team as a research librarian in January 2023. Scheeren was previously at the Congressional Research Service, where she was a law librarian in the American Law Division, serving members of Congress, congressional committees and staff.
Matt Wakeman is assistant dean for financial aid, education and planning for the Law School. Prior to joining UVA, Wakeman worked at Rice University, where he served as director of student financial services for the Jones Graduate School of Business.
Greg Whitmore joined the Law Library as administrative technologies librarian in 2022. Whitmore has over 15 years of international and national experience in team projects related to multimedia preservation, digitization, cataloging and public outreach.
Li Zhang oversees the Legal Data Lab, where he supports and promotes empirical legal research. A computational social scientist by training, Zhang provides research support in various areas such as data cleaning, modeling, natural language processing, social network analysis, cloud computing, web scraping, experimental design and data visualization.
Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.
