David Lifka is Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Cornell University. He directs Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) and works with the president, deans, vice presidents, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell Tech and the board of trustees to plan Cornell’s IT strategy. Lifka earned his BS in computer science from Benedictine in 1988. Lifka went on to receive an MS in computer science at North Central, and his Ph.D. in computer science at Illinois Institute of Technology. After several technical positions at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (then known as the Cornell Theory Center) as a systems programmer, advancing through the ranks to become director in 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. He is a past chair of the educational nonprofit Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, with 85 member institutions dedicated to advocating the use of advanced computing technology to accelerate scientific discovery.