Melissa Terras is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage within Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research contributions are in the area of digitisation of cultural heritage, covering three main areas: advanced digitisation techniques and approaches; understanding large-scale digitisation in the cultural heritage sector and how it can be best deployed for and by users as well as by institutions; and utilising the results of digitisation to undertake novel research and innovative projects in the arts and humanities. Recently, she has been working on the use of advanced technology in the cultural and creative industries, particularly how we can support innovation in this area.

Melissa is Director of Creative Informatics, the Edinburgh based AHRC Creative Cluster (2018-2024), and a founding Director of Transkribus, the AI-powered platform for text recognition of historical documents. She is the University of Edinburgh lead for CoSTAR (UK Government’s Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime) programme (2023-29).

With a background in Classical Art History and English Literature (MA, University of Glasgow), and Computing Science (MSc IT with distinction in Software and Systems, University of Glasgow), her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use image processing and machine learning to interpret and read deteriorated Ancient Roman texts. She previously directed UCL Centre for Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003-2017, and was Vice Dean of Research in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-2017). She is the founding Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and was Director of Research for the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2017-2023). 

She is an Expert Advisor to the UK Government’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and has served on many boards and committees in leading UK Cultural Heritage organisations including the National Library of Scotland, National Gallery (London), British Library, and Science Museum Group.