The University of California, Santa Barbara has announced the appointment of Thomas Putnam as Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, effective August 15, 2007. The appointment followed a national search.
Putnam is currently the Executive Director of Computing and Information Services at Texas A&M University.
He comes to UC Santa Barbara with nearly 40 years of computer systems experience, including 35 years of management responsibility in university, scientific, and engineering R&D oriented environments.
"We look forward to the extraordinary commitment and leadership that Tom will bring to this important position as the campus's first Chief Information Officer," said UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang.
Putnam earned his BA in physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He worked on scientific programs at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, developed operating systems and hospital clinical laboratory systems at Honeywell, Inc., and led the user services organization at Purdue University.
At Texas A&M, Putnam's work initially involved strategic projects including system-wide library resource sharing and project management for the financial accounting system.
For the past 11 years, he has directed the central Computing and Information Services organization that supports academic, research, and administrative computing as well as networking.
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