The iSchool is pleased to welcome several new members to its Founding Board, Informatics Advisory Board and Master of Science in Information Management Advisory Board.
These advisory boards foster closer ties between the University of Washington Information School and industry. Board members are a select group of business and community leaders with high capacity who are committed to promoting the academic and research enterprise of the iSchool. The boards offer strategic advice to the dean and program chairs.
The new members include:
Chris Miller, Founding Board. As CIO at Avanade, Miller guides the development of technical infrastructure and applications architecture for Avanade. He also works closely with Microsoft to ensure Avanade's position as an aggressive early adopter of Microsoft enterprise technologies.
Veresh Sita, Founding Board. As CIO at Alaska Airlines, Sita has oversight of a department of 300 information technology professionals and is responsible for investing in the airline’s infrastructure, enterprise systems and technical innovation. As the company grows and works toward its objective of making Alaska and Horizon the easiest airlines to fly, Veresh plays a very critical role in making that happen. Veresh’s rich IT background helps the company build user-friendly and reliable systems.
Rafat Naqvi, Informatics Advisory Board. As Global Vice President for Enterprise Applications at Avanade, Naqvi specializes in exploiting emerging technologies to transform business practices and outcomes from the status quo to the yet unimagined. As a veteran technology evangelist, she is a driving force in defining the digital workplace, leading cloud transformation, innovating digital service design, and exploiting enterprise data toward digital disruption.
Henry Rose, Informatics Advisory Board. Rose is a Senior Software Engineer at Porch, a startup company whose mission is to “Help everyone, everywhere, love their home.” He leads the Growth Engineering team, tasked with supporting the demand side of a Home Improvement marketplace.
Steven Miller, MSIM Advisory Board. Miller leads academic programs for IBM Analytics Group. His primary focus is collaborating with universities to build the pipeline of talent needed by the data driven organization. Miller’s work includes data and analytics literacy, and he focuses on emerging specialist roles such as data scientist and data engineer.
Monica McCool, MSIM Advisory Board. McCool is currently a Senior Product Manager at Vertafore. She has experience in both business and technology roles that enable her to focus on uniting people, process, and technology to develop software solutions that solve customers’ business problems. She is a serial “intrapreneur” focused on creating new revenue streams and bringing them to market for B2B and B2C applications in insurance, legal, banking, financial services, retail, and health-care industries.