UC Santa Cruz welcomed their new Vice Chancellor of Information Technology, Aisha Jackson, on Aug. 1, 2022.
Jackson makes a great addition to the UCSC campus community. She is a thoughtful, collaborative leader who believes in empowering staff, and she arrives with a wealth of experience in higher education technology. Most recently Jackson served as the University of Colorado Boulder’s first-ever Assistant Vice Provost and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Technology and Student Success. That position was created to ensure the continual advancement of campus technology to serve both faculty and students. It was a unique role in that it bridged the academic and administrative sides of that university, with oversight of academic technology and student-success analytics, for example, as well as some administrative platforms.
Before transitioning to the Assistant Vice Provost and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Technology and Student Success role, Aisha served as a faculty member and ICT Trainer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. She earned a doctorate in education from the University of Colorado, Denver; a master’s in education from the University of Florida, Gainesville; and a bachelor of arts in elementary education from Flagler College in Florida.
In her new role, Jackson plans to build upon the strategic and operational excellence of both academic and administrative information technology to support and advance all aspects of the campus mission. In the coming weeks and months, she’ll be meeting with many campus constituents and doing a lot of listening with the goal of understanding the challenges and opportunities UCSC faces.
Jackson said, “I am so honored to join such a wonderfully talented group of people in ITS and be part of such an amazing university.”
Jackson, her husband, Dr. Jelliffe Jackson, and their dog Soca moved to Santa Cruz in July.
She is attending her first UC Tech Conference at UC Diego this week. If you’re attending, make sure to say hi and give her a big California welcome!