IT News

Many people think of a new year beginning on January 1 or as the start of the academic year each fall. The University of Arizona's fiscal calendar begins on July 1 and runs through June 30, serving as the foundation for budgeting, accounting and financial operations across campus. The new fiscal year officially begins in July. Year-end financial activities, however, continue through August, with Federal grants closing later in September. Behind the scenes, months of planning and coordination make sure every transition happens accurately and with minimal disruption.

University IT Services teams are constantly implementing improvements—from network speed, to application updates, to reducing phishing emails. Almost all campus technologies, though, rely on identification, authentication and authorization. Every time you log in with your NetID and password, campus systems verify your identity and affiliation (student, employee, retiree, etc.). This architecture is the domain of the Identity & Access Management (IAM) team. 

As Vice President and Head of Delivery at ALTEN, located in India, he leads large-scale engineering programs, oversees AI-driven transformation initiatives, and helps organizations navigate increasingly complex technological landscapes. Yet despite years of experience in engineering, delivery, and business leadership, he saw an opportunity to deepen his understanding of the technologies shaping the future.

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.

The university’s Research Data Center (RDC) is preparing to install a new HPC cluster in fall 2026. The new system will have 40 nodes of CPU compute, two 8-GPU nodes with H200 GPUs, and one 3TB High-memory node, and will incorporate InfiniBand networking for MPI capabilities. It will be available sometime in the later part of this year.

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.