Lifka

David Lifka, director of the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, has been named the university’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, effective June 1. Lifka has been serving as interim vice president and CIO since December, when former CIO Ted Dodds retired.

As vice president and CIO, Lifka will direct Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) and work with the president, deans, vice presidents, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell Tech and the board of trustees to plan Cornell’s IT strategy. He will report jointly to Provost Michael Kotlikoff and to Joanne DeStefano, executive vice president and chief financial officer.

“Dave is a national leader in research computing and data management. He has worked in close association with a diverse array of members of the Cornell community at all levels and is highly regarded as a strategic leader,” said Kotlikoff, in announcing the appointment May 2. “He is well-prepared to manage the delivery, support and maintenance of academic, administrative and general campus IT services.”

Added DeStefano: “David has senior-level operational experience with information technology systems, operations, planning and financing. He will be able to oversee the university’s technology resources while maintaining a high degree of stewardship in responsible management.”

“I’m very excited and honored to take on this role,” Lifka said. “I was looking forward to a new challenge in my career.”

He looks forward, he said, to continuing work already in progress as part of the university’s streamlining initiative. “The long-term goal is to demonstrate the value of the services CIT provides,” he said. “We’re working very hard to continue the good work Ted did to build trust with the campus.”

Longer term, he hopes to launch a major initiative to improve security – in collaboration with peer institutions – and explore the use of data analytics to improve business processes.

Lifka graduated in 1988 from Illinois Benedictine College with a B.S. in computer science, received an M.S. in computer science at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, in 1991, and earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1998.

After several technical positions at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (then known as the Cornell Theory Center) as a systems programmer, advancing through the ranks to become director in 2007. In 2010 he took on the additional role of director of research computing for Weill Cornell Medicine, helping researchers cope with “big data” challenges such as gene sequencing; he has managed collaborations and sharing of computing resources between the two campuses.

As an adjunct associate professor of computing and information science, Lifka has taught high-performance computing courses in the Computing and Information Science curriculum.

He is a past chair of the educational nonprofit Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, with 85 member institutions dedicated to advocating the use of advanced computing technology to accelerate scientific discovery.