Feature Stories

Chancellor Woolsey grew up in a small Missouri town where he spent his plentiful free time marveling at fictional depictions of the future. He watched computers advance, and in his college years 3D printing, then ChatGPT. Somewhere between Star Wars marathons and a lifelong love of science fiction, he developed a question that would follow him to a PhD program at the University of Arizona: what if the technology we've been dreaming about on screen could actually help people?

Trellis CRM, the University of Arizona's enterprise constituent relationship management program, improves the university constituent experience by helping units make data-informed decisions in their day-to-day workflows. Of the products in the Trellis ecosystem, Trellis Events allows users to easily create and manage free or paid virtual, hybrid, and in-person campus events.

Many people think alumni engagement is only about keeping graduates informed. At the University of Arizona, it’s about building lifelong relationships, and increasingly, technology is helping make those connections more personalized, strategic, and scalable than ever before.

What is the IT job market going to look like in three years? With the advances in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence, it’s difficult to know, which is especially challenging for students working towards their degrees. Luckily, researchers at the University of Arizona are engaged in numerous important projects, from machine learning to quantum computing to health sciences and health sciences engineering.

When the Compass Assistant and Resource Advisor (CARA) recently went live, it marked more than the launch of another chatbot. It represented something bigger: a growing, campus-wide movement to bring practical, secure, and deeply integrated AI tools into everyday work across the University of Arizona.

Across the University of Arizona’s IT ecosystem, a quiet yet transformative effort is nearing completion, one most campus users will experience firsthand, often with a single click to submit a ServiceNow ticket. Beneath that simplicity lies a complex, months-long effort to integrate dozens of independent systems and workflows into a unified platform.

In 1987, the University of Arizona stood at the edge of something new. Today, as Microsoft Teams becomes the hub of collaboration across campus, it’s easy to think we’re navigating uncharted territory. But for many in IT, especially those who remember the early days here at the university, the story feels strikingly familiar.

Members of the campus community are relying on the university’s critical systems to be secure—preventing bad actors from sabotaging services or stealing information. The core of information security is risk management. The Information Security Risk Management Program (RMaP) provides Information Resource Owners a way to identify and minimize potential risks to university systems and information before a successful threat is realized. For 2026, the RMaP cycle is in its 7th year. The program runs every spring, with completion due by June 30.

Eight years ago, the university faced a moment of change. As Skype reached the end of its lifecycle, teams in UITS needed a new way to communicate. What followed was months of evaluation, testing, and discussion, ultimately leading to the decision to adopt Slack at a time when Microsoft Teams was still emerging and not yet fully mature.

What will happen to rainforests as global temperatures rise with climate change? Biosphere 2 has the hottest rainforest on the planet—there’s a huge temperature change from the shaded forest floor to the top of the tree canopy under the Arizona sun. That makes it the ideal place for postdoctoral researcher Justin Bestily to study resilience in plant life.