AUSTIN, Texas—Daniel A. Updegrove, who has been the chief information officer at Yale University for the past four years, has accepted the position of vice president for information technology at The University of Texas at Austin. The appointment was announced Tuesday (Oct. 31) and is effective Jan. 1, 2001.
The new vice president position was created as part of President Larry R. Faulkner’s reorganization of the campus administration. The changes — the first in 20 years at the University — are being made to improve service and modernize operations at UT Austin.
Updegrove will be responsible for academic computing and instructional technology services, administrative computing services and telecommunications. The job includes oversight of the University’s hardware and software infrastructure as well as education and training related to information technology. Faulkner has said that one of the goals in this area is to integrate current and next-generation voice, data and video services.
At Yale, Updegrove directs 390 staff members responsible for academic media/technology and administrative systems services; data, voice and video networking; data center operations; central and distributed support services; information security; and reprographics/design services for a campus with 11,000 students and 11,000 faculty and staff. Under Updegrove’s leadership, Yale has substantially enhanced support for technology in teaching and learning, upgraded data and voice networks and replaced aging administrative systems with new client/server applications and a data warehouse. He also has lectured, published and consulted extensively in the areas of campus computing strategies, data networking, enterprise systems implementation and computer-based modeling of financial and economic systems.
“Dan Updegrove has a terrific combination of experience and personal qualities for this new vice presidency. He has already served as a chief information officer at a leading university, he has an established presence as a national leader in the field and he is well connected with the external technology community,” said Faulkner in announcing the appointment. “UT is now one of America’s most exciting settings in information technology. I am very pleased that we have been able to recruit a person of Dan Updegrove’s caliber into this new post, and I am confident that he will give superb leadership.”
Updegrove, who also is adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Yale, said he was looking forward to joining the UT Austin administration and to his role in the strategic development of the information/communication infrastructure and services of the University.
“I am honored to become part of President Faulkner’s management team, and I am excited to join such a large and vigorous community of scholars, technology experts and computer users,” Updegrove said.
Updegrove received a B.S. degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Cornell University in 1970, where he also served as a graduate teaching and research assistant in the departments of government and urban planning. He has held several other positions in the last 25 years, including associate vice provost of information systems and computing at the University of Pennsylvania; vice president of Educom (now Educause) in Princeton, NJ, and research associate at Yale and the National Bureau of Economic Research. At Educom, he designed the EFPM financial modeling software system used by more than 100 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.
Active in the national computing scene, Updegrove currently serves as co-chair of a national task force on Internet security under the auspices of Educause as well as a member of higher education advisory boards for Apple Computer and Dell Computer Corp. Previously, he was a higher education adviser to IBM and Microsoft, and chairman of the board of PREPnet, a statewide network in Pennsylvania.
