Lifka

David Lifka, director of the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and associate chief information officer, has been named interim vice president for information technology and CIO to replace Ted Dodds, who will leave Cornell Dec. 6. Lifka will serve in this capacity until a permanent replacement for Dodds is selected.

“David has many years of experience at Cornell and in the field of information technology at both the Weill Cornell and Ithaca campuses,” said Joanne DeStefano, executive vice president and chief financial officer, in announcing the appointment. “He has led the IT service units, as well as providing the CIO and CIT leadership team with insights on faculty and research requirements to align current and future service offerings.”

“I am honored and excited to have been asked to be the interim CIO for Cornell,” Lifka said. “My goal is to work closely with the executive vice president, provost and CIT leadership to ensure continuity and continued progress on the important initiatives started under Ted Dodds’ leadership.”

Lifka has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and nearly 30 years of experience in high-performance computing at Cornell and the Argonne National Laboratory.

He has served as director of the Center for Advanced Computing since 2007. In 2010 he took on the additional role of director of research computing for Weill Cornell Medicine, helping researchers cope with “big data” challenges such as gene sequencing; he has managed collaborations and sharing of computing resources between the two campuses. As an adjunct associate professor of computing and information science, he has taught high-performance computing courses in the Computing and Information Science curriculum.