KEARNEY – Andrea Childress has been hired as the new UNK Chief Information Officer and University of Nebraska Assistant Vice President for Information Technology Services. Her new role became effective Tuesday.
NU Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Bret Blackman and UNK Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs Charlie Bicak made the announcement today (Wednesday) following an internal search and interview process.
An employee of the University of Nebraska at Kearney since 1994, Childress moves into the role after working as UNK’s Executive Director of IT Services since 2000. Within the University of Nebraska Cybersecurity and Identity Team, she has led the Governance, Risk and Compliance team as executive director since March 2017.
Childress replaces Deb Schroeder, who retired after 41 years at UNK. Jane Petersen served as Interim CIO for UNK from June through October.
As Chief Information Officer and Assistant Vice President for Information Technology Services, Childress serves on the Chancellor’s Administrative Council and leads the ITS academic technologies group and application development and support teams at UNK. She also is a member of the University of Nebraska’s ITS senior leadership team.
ITS is a unified organization of more than 300 staff responsible for IT services at three campuses and Central Administration. The NU ITS organization came together in Spring 2017 with the overarching goals of balancing campus needs while leveraging scale through a shared services model for the Security, Infrastructure, Client Services, Enterprise Services, and Strategy & Planning divisions of ITS.
Childress has served UNK and the University of Nebraska in numerous leadership capacities, with significant accomplishments in application development and support, academic technology, cybersecurity, and IT leadership.
She has a Master of Business Administration from UNK and Bachelor of Science Comprehensive Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Management and Management Information Systems from UNK.
Childress has implemented a variety of administrative, academic and cybersecurity initiatives at UNK that automated, streamlined and transformed IT services, including student information, learning management, campus ID card and customer relationship management systems.
Her many professional affiliations include serving on committees and panels for EDUCAUSE Security Professionals Conference, Leadership Board for CIO’s in Higher Education, Big 10 Academic Alliance and Woman Advance IT presentations and steering committee.
Childress has served and chaired Information Technology Service steering, search and leadership committees while also being recognized with multiple UNK awards throughout her career, including: UNK Staff Senate Teamwork Excellence Award, Staff Award for Excellence, ITS Technology Excellence Award, Recognition of Excellence Awards for Emergency Operations and NeSIS Project teams.
