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UC Santa Barbara Appoints First Chief Information Officer

  • By Paul McCloskey
  • 06/18/07
Following a national search, the University of California, Santa Barbara has appointed Thomas Putnam its associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer. Putnam, whose appointment followed a national search, will start Aug. 15.

Putnam is now the executive director of computing and information services at Texas A&M University. He has 40 years of computer systems experience and 35 years of management responsibility in university, scientific, and engineering R&D circles.

Putnam holds a BA in physics from the University of Colorado-Boulder and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory developed operating systems and at Honeywell Inc. designing hospital clinical laboratory systems. He also led the user services organization at Purdue University.

At Texas A&M, Putnam worked on system-wide library resource sharing and project management for the financial accounting system. For the past 11 years, he has directed A&M’s central computing and information services organization that supports academic, research, and administrative computing as well as networking.

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About the Author

Paul McCloskey is contributing editor of Syllabus.

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