Education Champions

As an associate director, solutions architecture in the Emory University Office of Information Technology (OIT) Research Solutions Unit, Circe leads a team enabling research with innovative technologies. She works closely with researchers in all aspects of the cloud, from architecture and design to budgeting and education.

As EVP, Global Education Program at EF Education First, Bjorn heads up EF EdTech’s global education platform. Founded in 1965, EF Education First delivers online, hybrid, and offline learning to millions of students worldwide. In his role, Bjorn has spearheaded using cloud technology to generate data and actionable insights that improve the learning experience and personalize each student’s learning journey. Bjorn leads the development of the immersive learning platform, EF STUDIO, by combining a groundbreaking, online classroom with the use of AI that personalizes feedback and learning for millions of students with tailored content, video analysis, and prediction of future needs.

Mike serves as vice president for data analytics at Illinois Institute of Technology, with responsibility for developing data-informed analysis to drive improvements in enrollment, student success, and other important university operations. He joined Illinois Tech in 1996 as an assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering, and became part of the senior leadership team in 2006 as vice-provost for undergraduate affairs.

Mike Coats spent almost a decade as an engineer with a managed service provider doing Microsoft and VMware engineering and support, before changing gears at Kalamazoo RESA, the local Educational Service Agency for Kalamazoo County in southwest Michigan. Mike now leads the Kalamazoo RESA infrastructure teams, including their Cloud Services team, and is working to “go statewide” to help support any school in the state with their AWS Cloud journey. 

John Rome is the deputy CIO at Arizona State University. A pioneer in data analytics, he helped build a data warehouse in ASU in the mid 1990s. John was also an early adopter of voice technology (including TedX talk) and was instrumental in the opening of the ASU Smart City Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) powered by AWS at ASU’s Skysong campus.

Don Wolff is the chief technology officer of Portland Public Schools (PPS) in Portland, Oregon. PPS is the largest school district in Oregon and is dedicated to creating exceptional and equitable opportunities for all students. He has devoted his professional career to public education, serving for over 30 years in various capacities. Don has been an elementary teacher, working with students in grades two, four and five, and has been a technology leader for 20 years.

Kari Robertson is the executive director of infrastructure services at University of California Office of the President (UCOP). Kari is responsible for University of California systemwide infrastructure services, supporting 19 campus locations as well as local IT services. At UCOP, she leads a team supporting cloud and on-premises hosting, system administration, database administration, application administration, service management, vendor management, network engineering, automation and 24/7 operations support.

Azizi Seixas, PhD, is a national and international thought leader in precision and personalized population health, digital health technology and innovation, and novel analytical tools like artifical intelligence and machine learning to tackle our most vexing public health issues.

Noora is a life scientist by education, a cloud engineer by profession, and an educator by passion. Prior to joining the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trial Consortium (PCCTC) at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Noora was a Senior Cloud Engineer at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), where she pioneered the design, development, and implementation of one of the first clinical genomics pipelines running at scale in the cloud.

The Austin Independent School District (Austin ISD) educates more than 73,000 students and embraces 116 diverse school communities in one of the fastest-growing metroplexes in the country. Austin ISD has relied on a cloud roadmap to help sustain and improve operations in the face of growing financial constraints.

As vice provost, enrollment management at UCI, Patty leads the offices of Undergraduate Admissions, Financial Aid and Scholarships, Registrar, and Enrollment Management Analytics. She is a transformative leader, nationally recognized for her innovative approaches to using technology, data and analytics to support student success. Passionate about “humanizing data,” Patty encourages a consultative, collaborative, silo-busting approach to analytics that takes a holistic view of data from the entire student lifecycle to improve the student experience.

As vice chair of education, holding the Patricia Borns Endowed Chair at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Janet oversees all education initiatives and operations in the Department of Radiology. In addition, Janet is a professor of clinical radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She uses machine learning to enhance radiologist performance and lifelong learning by incorporating intelligent tutors using recommender algorithms for knowledge delivery.

As the vice president and chief information officer at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA), Dr. Moore manages all academic and administrative technologies for the campus including networking and cyber security. Facing the challenge of climate change head-on (enduring five hurricanes in five years), Dr. Moore drove the strategic decision to improve the resilience, sustainability, and security of XULA systems by moving to the cloud.

As director of library information technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library, Tracy provides leadership, management, and planning for IT services and infrastructure that support the activities of one of the world’s great research libraries. She also works closely with partners such as the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) and the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) to provide technical guidance regarding existing and emerging digital services.

As a research cloud lead for Information Technology Services at the University of Michigan, Jim works to ensure researchers have the right tools and technologies to advance their research. Jim helped build a secure enclave/landing zone on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to enable researchers to work in a secure environment to store and analyze restricted research data. The enclave design was successful and is now the model the university uses for secure enclaves for other use cases and research projects. Jim continues to evaluate and test AWS services to determine the optimal efficiency of the enclave and other solutions provided at the university.