Phyllis Pawa is an archivist, specializing in Jewish American history and government archives. She is passionate about documenting, preserving, and sharing Jewish community histories. Her particular focus is on narratives of under-represented communities and topics in Jewish studies like Jewish women, Southern Jewish history, and Jewish food culture. She loves government archives because of its detail-oriented and systematic nature. She got into archives through her time in the Harvard museums and a desire to increase museum accessibility through digitization, adherence to ADA and WCAG standards, and further transparency and access to their materials.

Phyllis received her Masters in Library and Information Sciences (MLIS) from Simmons University, she had a concentration in archival management and took additional courses in the cultural heritage informatics concentration. Prior to Simmons she studied religion receiving her Masters in Theology from Harvard University and her bachelor of religion at Whitman College. Her concentration at both Harvard and Whitman was Jewish studies and American religious history.