Brown University appoints 17-year employee to serve as next CIO

Sarah Latham, Brown University’s executive vice president for finance and administration, announced Tuesday that the university’s assistant chief information officer is being promoted to lead the college’s information technology department.

Christopher Keith first joined the university in 2007 as director of information technology and has held several roles since, including director of enterprise applications and software engineering, according to his LinkedIn page. He starts as the university’s chief information officer and vice president for information technology on May 1.

“Brown has an amazing team of leaders, and to be able to work with them and contribute to strategies for moving Brown forward as an institution is an amazing privilege,” Keith said in a press release. “If there’s one thing that I hope to achieve in my tenure, it is to even more effectively position OIT to be a strategic partner across partnership conversations with leaders across campus to dig in and explore how OIT can help enable even more data and technology solutions for faculty, students and staff.”

Keith was appointed to serve as CIO following a national search to fill the position after Sharon P. Pitt left the role in November to work as CIO at Virginia Tech. The search process included input from campus stakeholders including faculty, staff and students, the release said.

“Chris has made many contributions during his tenure at Brown, most recently assisting in our work to develop an IT roadmap for the campus, institute an IT governance model and advance an effective data governance model to support the information needs of our campus community,” Latham wrote in the release. “Over this time, Chris has become a trusted partner and valued colleague and has gained a reputation for his integrity and his dedication to the Brown University mission.”

Prior to joining the staff at Brown 17 years ago, Keith spent seven years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, first as a naval flight officer and later as a member of the information warfare community at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, Rhode Island, according to the release.