Lemoie appointed Digital Credentials Consortium director

A leader in web standards and open source technology, Lemoie will develop and lead the consortium’s strategy.

By Sara Feijo

Kerri Lemoie, a pioneer in the field of digital credentials and open standards, was named director of the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC), effective Sept. 1.

DCC, part of MIT Open Learning, is a group of 13 higher education institutions in North America and Europe that are building an infrastructure for verifiable digital credentials of academic achievement. As director of the DCC, Lemoie will lead the consortium’s strategy and its research and advocacy projects. She will also oversee a team that manages the design, development, and deployment of DCC technology, infrastructure, software, and services.

“We are thrilled that Kerri Lemoie is taking on this new role,” says Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for open learning. “A gifted technologist, thoughtful practitioner, and dedicated advocate of open credentials, she is perfectly suited to lead the DCC into its next phase.”

Lemoie, a leader in web standards and open source technology, has a history of participation in the consortium’s mission. She initially joined DCC in August 2022 as its director of technology, overseeing the development, planning, and strategy of verifiable digital credentialing technology. Krishna Rajagopal, chair of the DCC Leadership Council and a professor of physics at MIT, says Lemoie’s work at the consortium has been “transformative.”

“It is because of her efforts that the DCC is now able to pivot from developing standards and tools to deploying those tools with institutions of higher education, including DCC members, which can now issue verifiable digital credentials to their students,” Rajagopal says. “People around the world will benefit from the trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure for digital academic credentials that Kerri and her team are catalyzing and creating.”

With more than 25 years of experience in web technology, Lemoie has served in multiple leadership capacities and advisory roles, including as a founding technical contributor of Open Badges, a widely referenced specification for data-rich, verifiable credentials. Lemoie’s work is focused on research, design, and development of web and internet solutions with the goal of increasing social mobility and championing a more trustworthy internet. She earned a PhD in media psychology from Fielding Graduate University. Her dissertation research focused on technology adoption of self-sovereign digital identity wallets. 

Lemoie says she is excited to lead DCC in its mission to create a shared infrastructure for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials digitally.

“Throughout my career, I’ve focused on making technology easier to use and understand and advocating for technologies that give people more control of their data,” Lemoie says. “I’m excited to have this opportunity as director of the DCC to continue this work with our team in collaboration with our member institutions.”

Lemoie succeeds Philipp Schmidt, who served as the director of the DCC since its inception in 2018. Schmidt is now the chief technology officer for Axim Collaborative, a nonprofit organization founded by MIT and Harvard University to address systemic equity gaps in higher education.

Rajagopal says he appreciates “the remarkable contribution that Philipp Schmidt has made, starting from identifying the need for what is today the Digital Credentials Consortium, to convening the discussions that led to its formation, to leading its development from zero to where it is today — from shaping its mission, vision, and values to development of standards to building open-source code for issuing, sharing, and verifying digital academic credentials.”

In addition to leading DCC, Lemoie serves as a ​​technical advisor to Arizona State University Trusted Learner Network, the co-chair of the W3C Verifiable Credentials for Education Task Force, and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Digital Promise Badging Coalition. 

Prior to joining DCC, Lemoie held leadership positions at Concentric Sky, InsureMyTrip.com, and Amazon.com. She served as the chief technology officer and co-founder of Achievery.com, one of the world’s first Open Badges platforms. Through her company OpenWorks Group, Lemoie served as a technical advisor to Jobs for the Future and lead researcher for the American Council on Education’s Education Blockchain Initiative.