Claudia Mendias was educated at the University of California, San Diego and the University of New South Wales. She started her academic career in the psychology labs of E. B. Ebbesen and V.J. Konecni investigating eyewitness confidence and memory accuracy.  For her PhD, she moved to Australia for the behavioral neuroscience labs of E.J. Kehoe. Memory for faces and schema formation were the basis of her work on policing ideals and their role in discretionary powers.  Her research interests are decision making, uncertainty, and discretion.

She sent her first email in the very early hours of some random 1980s-morning from a well-used computer lab at UCSD- back when students could only use computers within labs at an assigned lab time-slots, her slots often started past 2am. This experience sparked an openness to apply technology to enhance customer service provision, which has formed her subsequent career.

She came to SOAS in 2014 with 20 years experience installing IT services and optimising business processes in banking, insurance, publishing, FE and HE operations, among other industries. At SOAS she Heads Strategy and Planning for the Library and Learning Services. She collaborates with colleagues across the directorate to review business processes,  define performance measures and analytics, source external funding for projects to enhance the discoverability, access and use of the library collections, among other things. 

Claudia can advise on the use of Open Source solutions within libraries, international collaboration in the development of software and library services, cross-database metadata aggregation and material-type agnostic discovery services.