Enhanced academic IT for Purdue faculty

Purdue Provost Patrick Wolfe and Chief Financial Officer Chris Ruhl today (March 8) announced the creation of Purdue Academic IT Faculty Support, a large team of experts focused on providing Purdue faculty with enhanced, customized computing services wherever needed. Gerhard Klimeck, Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will lead the team in the newly created role of deputy chief information officer, reporting to Purdue’s CIO Ian Hyatt.

The provost and the chief financial officer will jointly review academic IT support on an annual basis.

To deliver excellence at scale, a user-focused Purdue IT will continue to embed local support for specialized academic IT needs and provide the infrastructure, personalized services, responsive solutions and information security necessary to enhance faculty research and support innovative teaching and learning.

An advisory council will be constituted. Initial members focused on cybersecurity and data include professors Sonia Fahmy, Sunil Prabhakar and Dongyan Xu. Additional members representing Purdue’s diverse research needs will be named. 

“Purdue is already a leading example for excellence in research computing for the nation,” said Provost Wolfe. “This addition of a high-level faculty support team overseen by an academic leader will ensure that our faculty with custom computing needs can work effectively and efficiently as together we seek to maximize our scholarly impact.”

Across Purdue’s colleges, many significant academic IT innovations continue to emerge. Professor Klimeck’s team will help to translate these across Purdue and enable the following:

• Enhanced research computing capabilities within the university and with our external commercial and governmental partners.
• Greater research and technology collaboration across our colleges, leading to new services and breakthroughs.
• Accelerated standardization and automation to enable our computing experts to more responsively support faculty and departments.
• New pathways to uncover and focus the future investments needed to advance our computing capabilities significantly.
• Leverage of capabilities in enterprise-IT in academic IT.
• Translation of academic IT advancements into enterprise-IT practice.

“Several meetings with academic IT leaders revealed rapidly that we all see exciting ways for our diverse teams to collaborate across academic disciplines and with central IT to advance research capabilities,” Klimeck said.

“Providing dedicated IT support to faculty and academic leaders aligns strongly with our mission to empower colleagues across Purdue to make their next giant leap,” Vice President for Information Technology and CIO Hyatt said.

Additional updates will be shared in the coming weeks.