I am pleased to announce the appointment of Victoria “Vicki” Farnsworth as the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, effective January 9, 2020.
Vicki Farnsworth is an experienced IT leader with over 25 years of academic experience in higher education. Her broad experience in IT, leadership accomplishments, and academic computing background made her the ideal fit to lead IT at UTC.
Farnsworth will be relocating to UTC from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she has spent her entire professional career in a variety of IT-related roles.
Since January 2017, Farnsworth has served as Purdue’s executive director of enterprise solutions. In this role, she led a large team of directors, managers, and technical staff in support of Purdue’s diverse application portfolio. This included setting the technology strategic direction for students, faculty, and administrative areas (financial aid, admissions, human resources, finance, advancement/engagement, sponsored programs, student life, conferences, digital education, etc.) through systems such as SAP, Banner, Blackboard, COEUS, SharePoint, and Micros.
Farnsworth began working for Purdue in 1995 and served in a variety of roles within IT over her career. In 2009, she moved to the academic side of IT, serving as managing director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. She led project activities for nanoHub.org, a National Science Foundation-funded research collaboration.
She returned to the university’s central IT department in 2014 as senior director in the Business Systems Competency Center, a position she held until taking over as the executive director of enterprise solutions.
Additionally, she has been a member of Purdue’s IT Operational Oversight Committee and has co-authored several publications in the IT field.
Farnsworth received both her bachelor’s degree in computer information systems and her master’s in systems management from Purdue.
I want to thank Dr. Yancy Freeman and all members of the Search Committee for their great work. I also want to thank Dean Theresa Liedtka and Ellucian CIO Dennis Gendron for the key roles they have played during the period of transition for IT at UTC.