My name is Adashima. I am new to the HASTAC Scholars Director role, but I have been serving with the Futures Intiative since last year. As part of my Futures Initiative Fellowship, I will be serving as the new HASTAC Scholars Director. I’m very excited about the opportunity to collaborate with you all. I know that we will have a productive year. So, a bit about me. I’m part of the Adjunct Faculty at NYU and CUNY. I’m a third year PhD student in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center. As an undergraduate, I was an English major but I was always more interested in the health conditions of the writers, and how their personal lives seeped into their writings. For example, I wrote my honors thesis about drug addiction and narcissism among famous 18^th Century poets. Given my general interest in health, I completed a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in 2006. I have a lot of research interests. Really, I do. However, there are two main topics that I don’t mind endlessly reading about or randomly discussing with friends and strangers. I care (very deeply) about the disproportionate burden of health disparities on Blacks and Latinos (or Latinx). As well, I’m troubled by the fact that the higher one goes in their formal educational pursuits, the fewer the number of Blacks and Latinos you see in the classroom or contributing to scholarship. Similarly, I’d really like to see more faculty on campus who look like me, and share some of my experiences. I think it’s important for the retention of Black and Latino students (at all levels from associate to doctoral).  I haven’t quite figured it out just yet, but I’m hoping to have a long career that merges my two research interests in some way.  For now, I’m very excited to be serving as the HASTAC Scholars Director. I hope to continue the efforts of Kalle Westerling and Raven Gomez. I really look forward to learning more about the various research interests of current (and potential) HASTAC Scholars.