Feature Stories

For nearly 70 years, Arizona Public Media (AZPM) operated from spaces in the University of Arizona’s Modern Languages building, which were never designed for modern broadcasting. Television studios occupied former classrooms and labs, repurposed from their original intent as distance-learning studios. Broadcast equipment grew organically over decades. Transmission paths stretched from campus to mountaintop towers and relay sites that deliver PBS, NPR, Classical and Jazz music, and emergency information across Southern Arizona, in addition to AZPM’s award-winning local productions.

When the University of Arizona Graduate College began exploring ways to better support prospective students, current students, and graduate coordinators, Patrick Barabe approached the topic with caution. As IT Director for the Graduate College, Barabe has spent years evaluating technology solutions and vendor claims. Like many experienced technology leaders, he has learned to approach emerging tools with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Most people interact with University Center for Assessment, Teaching and Technology (UCATT) through a workshop or a Brightspace question. What they may not see is the broader network of support the team provides to instructors and departments throughout the university.

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.