Educause CIO headed to University of Illinois
Educause Chief Information Officer Mairead Martin is moving on to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after three years with the higher ed IT organization.
Martin announced her next job as the 56,000-student university’s CIO on LinkedIn this week. The CIO role involves overseeing an IT department with a $56 million budget and leading a council consisting of other IT leaders from around campus, according to a profile of the job posted by search firm Isaacson Miller.
The job description cites developing an IT strategic plan as one of the role’s tasks. There is no current strategic plan for the IT department, though Illinois is working on a university-wide plan for 2023-2028.
“The CIO will engage in that continued work and build upon the broader goals of the University to establish technology as a key factor in driving innovation at Illinois,” the profile reads. “There is an opportunity to build upon the momentum captured as a result of the technology shift during COVID-19. Community members are no longer wed to legacy technologies, and the moment is ripe for advancing tech innovation across the campus.”
The University of Illinois hasn’t had a permanent CIO since Mark Henderson left for the University of Pittsburgh in 2019.
Interim CIO Greg Gulick died in February 2021 from COVID-19. Illinois later announced a cancer and coronavirus research program in his honor. The campus’s deputy CIO of IT operations, Scott Genung, stepped in as interim CIO.
Martin joined Educause in 2019 from Tufts University in Massachusetts, where she was associate CIO for service delivery and operations. Before that, Martin held IT leadership positions at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tennessee.
