Speaker: Beth Hayes

Beth Hayes is the Deputy CIO at Vassar College managing Enterprise Systems including administrative, systems, networking, and telecom. Her experience in IT spans academia, non-profit, and corporate organizations. She holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University. Beth’s approach involves finding the strengths of people and balancing them with the strengths of technology to find solutions that improve business performance. Software as a service and cloud technologies are the latest tools to meet that need.
 

Speaker: Criss Laidlaw

Criss has worked in higher education for eighteen years and in information technology for even longer. He has extensive experience working with campus offices to make effective use of technology, especially database-driven administrative information systems. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) and chairs its Cloud Monitoring Work Group, which recently published a white paper on considerations for moving administrative applications to cloud platforms.


Speaker: Steve Machuga

Steve Machuga is the Director of Administrative Systems at Wesleyan University. Working with both ITS staff and Administrative Offices across campus, Steve is responsible for Wesleyan’s PeopleSoft ERP (Campus Solutions, Human Resources and Financial Systems), the Millennium Fundraising System and the University Portal. In the past several years, Wesleyan has implemented many SaaS applications including: Slate Admission, Maxient Student Conduct, PeopleAdmin, Explorance Blue Teaching Evaluations, Blackboard Connect, SalesForce Marketing Cloud, Name-Coach and others. Steve has a B.A. in English from Fairfield University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer at Hartford.


Speaker: Sarah Moriarty

Sarah Moriarty has been a leader in higher education for 12 years, with 4 ½ years as Director of Administrative Technology at Smith College, and 8 years as Director of Enterprise Systems Trinity College. Previously, she owned consulting businesses delivering services to G.E., Stanley, Bell Atlantic, Tetley, Hartford Graduate Center, and others. As a corporate officer, she headed the Phoenix Mutual field administration department. Sarah earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Smith College and a master’s degree with honors in public policy from Trinity College where she specialized in philanthropy and higher education endowment. Her passion is in building high performance organizations, enabling user self-sufficiency, and facilitating data-driven decision making. In her free time, Sarah manages English change ringing at Smith, one of six collegiate bell tower locations in North America.


Speaker: Praveen Shanbhag

Praveen holds a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University and BA from Harvard University, and has served as an instructor and lecturer at both Stanford and Foothill College. Like all philosophically-trained individuals, he likes asking unusual questions, and one was: 'if we all know that the sweetest sound to a person is their own name, why are names so often mispronounced even at critical settings in our lives?' After hearing his sister’s name mangled at her college graduation, he founded NameCoach with the help of an amazingly-talented team dedicated to providing a solution. The company has quickly grown to over 250 schools and recently closed a funding round with Peter Thiel. Praveen looks forward to continuing the mission of harnessing technology to advance inclusivity. He also loves coding and sci-fi shows.