While I've been at Amherst College for more than a decade and spent the past few years leading the Web Services department, I have nearly 20 years of IT industry work experience, from web startups to Fortune 500s. Education has always been an important part of my life. I know the value of, and continue to support, education, both as a lifelong learner and by ensuring we provide tools that pave the way for student success. Over the years my work has included areas, such as project managment, leadership, application development, data analytics and visualization, accessibility, user interface, user experiece and more.

Reach out to me if you have questions about the main college website, a personal or academic website, business applications, integration, online forms, the learning managment system, data analysis... or if you just want to chat about new ideas.

Pronouns: he/him/his

Current Projects

College Website Update (D7/D8 Migration)

21 million visitors per year. Globally, it is the first view of the college by students, faculty, staff, parents, etc. The main website framework, Drupal 7, is entering end-of-life and can be updated to Drupal 8. This is predictable maintenance that has been planned for a couple years, and is a multi-year project with multiple sub-projects. It supports the necessary security and performance of business critical site and provides a solid, stable first-view of the college.

Business Applications Update

The main college site houses dozens of applications that serve the business of the college and the broad college community. Many applications can be replaced with licenced serviecs, moved outside the main site as separate business applications, or retired. It will provide better, faster, more robust critical business applications; aid in reducing the load for the major main website update; and offers the opportunity to reassess the features and benefits of the current business applications.

Campus Directory

The college currently makes use of several directories with, at times, mismatched profile information for faculty, staff, students, alumni and others. A single campus directory will combine and take the place of these multiple directories, providing a more stable view of profile information. Continued version updates are planned to provide a single place for preference settings, profile photo uploads, and notifications to confirm profile information. When fully active, it may act as a single source for profile information; reduce workloads by automating course catalog and print directory information; and may aid in providing stable information to connect new applications with existing college profile data.

Cloud Migration

Many colleges and universities are following the broad IT industry in rapidly adopting cloud-based services. Amherst College currently houses much of the technology infrastructure on-premise. As part of normal operations and maintenance, IT is intending to move the main college website, the learning management system, and many academic sites to a cloud hosting provider. This is a multi-year effort to sustain the services and systems that currently power the business of the college. The cloud migration project may take advantage of immediately scalable infrastructure for heavy traffic periods and may outsource much of the server security, compliance, maintenance, and quality aspects so the team can focus on more innovative ventures.

Mobile App Update

The Amherst College Mobile App was a wildly successful application when first released in 2014. Originally prompted by the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), the app features currently support student-specific interests. In 2016, a discussion of mobile app strategy lead to a decision to expand coverage of the mobile app features to better support a broader audience with tailored features and communition to support faculty, staff, alumni, visitors, and more.