Joanne Romagni
Tyler Forrest
Daniel Pack
Three administrators from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga have been chosen to help the University of Tennessee System transition from the present to the future.
Joanne Romagni, vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate school; Daniel Pack, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science; and Tyler Forrest, associate vice chancellor for budget and finance, are now part of the system-wide, 15-member team called the UT Executive Leadership Institute.
With a large number of system administrators eligible to retire within the next five years, the program will develop a plan to groom new leaders to step into the roles.
“We estimate that 40 percent of our administrators will be eligible to retire in the next five years—creating vacancies in as many as 100 positions,” said Bob Smith, former chancellor at UT Martin who designed the team and now heads it. “The institute will help ensure the right people with the right skills are ready to advance as opportunities become available.”
Special development plans, executive coaching, mentoring and hands-on learning will be part of the institute’s classes, which meet six times over a year for multi-day sessions.
Candidates for the institute were nominated by their supervisors and competitively selected by campus and institute leaders.
Joe DiPietro, president of the UT System who is retiring in November, said he always intended “to leave this place in better shape than I found it.”
“I believe in the importance of developing leadership skills and understanding leadership’s role in higher education and look forward to teaching part-time in the program during retirement,” he said.
At UTC, Romagni became the school’s first vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate school in July 2015. Before coming to UTC, she was associate vice chancellor for research at DePaul University in Chicago.
Pack joined UTC in 2015, leaving his position as chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Prior to that post, he was founding director of the U.S. Air Force Academy Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research.
In 2010, Forrest came to UTC as a financial analyst and was selected as associate vice chancellor for budget and finance in 2017. A UTC alumnus and former Student Government Association president, he also was a student member of the UT Board of Trustees.
For more information about the UT Executive Leadership Institute, go to: president.tennessee.edu/executive-leadership-institute.
