Polley Ann McClure, Cornell University vice president for information technologies, has been named this year's recipient of the EDUCAUSE Award for Excellence in Leadership. It is the highest individual award given by EDUCAUSE, an association addressing the complex issues of incorporating information technologies and resources into the higher education mission.

The award will be presented Nov. 6 at a general session of the EDUCAUSE annual conference in Anaheim, Calif., which is expected to draw more than 6,000 professionals involved in the management of information resources in higher education. During a featured session later that day, McClure will describe lessons learned as a biologist, a professor and a partner of her dog, Ivy, with whom she competes in agility trials, and describe how these experiences contribute to understanding effective academic and IT leadership.

McClure will receive a commemorative trophy custom-designed by Colorado artist John Haertling. As part of the award, EDUCAUSE will make a $5,000 contribution in her name to the Graduate School Gift Fund at Cornell to provide support for a female Ph.D. student in either the ecology and evolutionary biology or the computing and information science programs.

According to the selection committee headed by H. David Todd, vice provost and CIO at the University of San Diego: "McClure reflects the award criteria through her extraordinary effectiveness, influence, statesmanship and lifetime achievement on both individual campuses and in the wider higher education community. She understands how to manage and lead change in the profession; she listens and challenges, helps others achieve their best and enables institutions to advance."

When McClure came to Cornell in the spring of 1999, she already was regarded as a leader in academic information technology administration. She had been vice president for information technology and communication and professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and, previously, associate vice president of information resources at Indiana University. Trained as a scientist, she taught ecology and evolutionary biology and conducted research on animal life-history traits at Indiana University, and she has continued to hold faculty appointments throughout her career. At Cornell she holds the rank of professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

She earned her Ph.D. in zoology, specializing in ecology, at the University of Texas at Austin in 1970, joined the faculty at Indiana University in 1971 and in 1983 became a full professor there. Early in her work she became interested in computing as a research tool, and this led to a role in developing computing resources for other researchers at Indiana University and eventually to her appointment in 1987 as the university's dean for academic computing.

She also has been an extremely important and influential leader of EDUCAUSE and its predecessor associations. While on the boards of both CAUSE and Educom, the organizations that merged to form EDUCAUSE, she guided strategic analyses that catalyzed the merger in 1998. As the first elected chair of the EDUCAUSE board, she helped define policy directions that gave substance to the new organization and was widely respected for her sensitivity to both individual and organizational concerns about the change.

Other volunteer commitments include consulting work for numerous universities and service on the boards of the Snowmass Seminars on Academic Computing, the Special Interest Group for University and College Computing Services and the Institute for Academic Technology, and on corporate advisory councils. She recently edited the newest volume in the EDUCAUSE Leadership Strategies series, "Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Your Campus."

The Excellence in Leadership Award is sponsored by SCT, a provider of software for academic institutions and an EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.