Suzanne Morse Moomaw, associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, is the new director of the University of Virginia Press. 

UVA Today reports that Moomaw has served on the press's board of directors since 2015 and will be on leave for the 2020-21 academic year to pursue the role. She will then begin the search for the press's next director starting in the spring of 2021. Moomaw is taking over for previous director Mark Saunders, who passed away May 19, 2019. 

Moomaw's hiring was announced in December and she took the reigns of the publishing house at the start of 2020. 

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Moomaw is the director of the Community Design Research Center at UVA, an entity focused on addressing the "wicked problems" faced by communities today. She has a long career in higher education and in philanthropic, non-profit, and research organizations, including an 18-year stint as the CEO of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a group dedicated to "resilience of urban and rural areas around the world," UVA Today reports. Moomaw has been at UVA since 2009, where her focus has included the work of the Community Design Research Center as well as research covering postindustrial regeneration in the United States and across Latin America, according to the report. 

Regarding her new position, Moomaw said via press release, "The challenges in our world require – demand – that scholarly presses bring the most creative and intellectually rigorous thinking to the larger world. The University of Virginia Press is perfectly poised to partner with our University as it enters its third century, with plans to do just that.”