Chris A. McCoy

As Director of Computing for the College of Engineering at Iowa State University, McCoy is the senior IT leader in the college responsible for developing and executing the IT vision and strategy and coordinating all IT activities across the college, where he leads a dynamic and committed team of more than 15 full-time staff and 25 students providing service to faculty, staff, and students.

The College of Engineering operates a full-service IT environment which augments the campus IT environment and serves more than 8,000 users each semester on more than 3,000 desktops, workstations and servers. Providing networked file storage, database, web, groupware, virtualization, remote access, printing, messaging, clustering/computational and other services, as well as a broad assortment of engineering applications the engineering IT team uses campus-leading techniques and procedures to provide a rich and robust environment that is second to none on campus.

McCoy was responsible for leading the single largest IT transformation in the history of the college, the "Seamless IT Initiative" in which all IT operations were combined under a shared-governance umbrella and fully integrated into the campus IT infrastructure. This initiative was the first step towards enhanced and enriched computing capabilities as part of an emerging vision of the college to develop the engineer of 2050. Current and future development projects for research, teaching, and administration include the creation of a college-wide computational grid, participation in the peta-scale initiatives, and continued emphasis on electronic process re-engineering.

McCoy has a bachelors of science in Computer Science from Iowa State University and has held UNIX system programming positions at Purdue University as well as other management positions at Iowa State University. He is currently pursuing an Executive MBA and Masters of Systems Engineering with expected completion in May 2009. McCoy is a tournament racquetball player and cycling enthusiast as well as a self-proclaimed leadership junkie. In his spare time, McCoy is frequently seen as an enthusiastic spectator with his wife, Cheryl, at sporting events across central Iowa for his four children.