Rebecca Purdom

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Rebecca Purdom has spent much of her career working on creating sustainable and accessible communities through access to legal education. Originally a newspaper reporter, Purdom pursued both a masters of policy and a law degree at Vermont Law School, where she was the managing editor of the law review. After clerking for the federal courts and a stint in private practice, she worked in land conservation and restoration before transitioning to teaching. Over the past 20 years her work has been at the forefront of expanding educational opportunities through hands-on clinical work and distance learning to ensure more students have the opportunity to study law. In addition to teaching in environmental and business programs at a variety of universities Dean Purdom has taught internationally, including in Zimbabwe, Brazil and Argentina, and worked on access to justice programs in Uganda. A founding member of the Working Group for Distance Learning in Legal Education, she served the faculty of Vermont Law School, where she served as the Associate Dean for Innovation and New Programs, as visiting faculty member at Stanford Medical School where she continues to teach classes in policy making for scientists, as the Executive Director of Graduate Programs and Professor of Practice at Emory University School of Law where she directed SJD, LLM and Masters degrees and taught a variety of environmental law topics. She now serves as the chief academic officer for the law school, where her work focuses on expanding residential and online offerings and degrees, faculty scholarship, and public interest programs.