Wharton School

Wharton Names Deirdre Woods Chief Information Officer and Associate Dean

July 20, 2004 — The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has named Deirdre Woods chief information officer (CIO) and associate dean. In this role, Woods leads a 95-person organization at Wharton Computing in developing and maintaining technologies that further the School’s leadership in experience-based learning.

In her 17 years at Wharton, Woods has been instrumental in bringing student and faculty satisfaction with IT services to the highest level, and has served as a strategic driver for some of Wharton Computing’s most innovative technologies. Specifically, through the Alfred West Learning Lab, Wharton is finding new ways of learning, building on an experiential-based approach and utilizing technology in areas such as real-time simulations, advanced research applications and group collaboration.

As associate dean and CIO, Woods will direct all technology initiatives, which have helped create an academic environment at Wharton that produces the highest learning outcomes and have enabled the most innovative research in management education. In addition to Learning Lab applications, these technologies include Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), SPIKE, the student intranet, WebCafe, Wharton’s student collaboration tool, and the Smithsonian-Award-nominated course auction.

“Deirdre’s leadership, energy and creativity have been invaluable to Wharton Computing and I am confident she will continue to serve as a role model in her capacity as CIO and associate dean,” said Scott Douglass, senior associate dean at the Wharton School.

In less than three years, Woods has directed the Wharton Learning Lab in the development and launch of more than 15 computer-based simulations, games and learning modules. These tools are infused throughout the Wharton curriculum and also are available to other schools through a partnership with Addison Wesley Publishing.

More than 15 years ago, Woods created a best practice that has been implemented by other business schools when she rolled out a distributed representative model of IT support for Wharton faculty. The model embeds IT representatives within faculty departments and has proven successful both in terms of customer satisfaction and efficiency.

The Wharton School is recognized around the world for its leadership and broad academic strengths across every major discipline and at every level of management education. Founded in 1881 as the nation's first collegiate business school, Wharton has approximately 4,600 undergraduates, MBA, and doctoral students, more than 8,000 participants in its executive education programs annually, and an alumni network of more than 80,000 worldwide.