Presenter Type: 2019 Speakers

Sengstock, Pete

Pete Sengstock

Email: pgsengstock@wisc.edu

Address:
College of Letters & Sciences (L&S)
Department of Communication Arts
Director of Media Services

Peter Sengstock

Biography

I’m responsible for most of the Department of Communication Arts’ underlying technology infrastructures, which support our instructional, research, and administrative goals. This includes our servers and storage arrays, as well as many of the core services deployed across them. I also serve as primary technical liaison between CommArts and the College of Letters and Science, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT), and the greater campus IT community. My other primary role is to supervise the excellent technical support staff who operate out of the Instructional Media Center.

2026 Session

The surprisingly simple tech behind digital cinema

2019 Session

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: IT lessons learned from building-wide disasters

Silver, Alan

Alan Silver

Email: asilver@chem.wisc.edu

Address:
Chemistry Department

2019 Sessions

 
Session 1: Building an IT Community
Session 2: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: IT lessons learned from building-wide disasters

2018 Sessions

Session 1
Title: TAG! You’re IT! (IT governance)
Co-Presenters: Nick Tincher, Lyn Van Swol
Description:
A panel discussion involving the chairs of the new campus IT governance groups Divisional Technical Advisory Group Infrastructure Technical Advisory Group Research Technical Advisory Group Teaching and Learning Technical Advisory Group
The chairs will discuss the objectives of each TAG and how they are operating. Join them for a Q&A session to understand the role of IT governance and how it might impact your work, and to share feedback to work toward optimizing efficiency of these groups.

Session 2:
Title: The IT Project Intake Process – Enabling Collaboration Across Campus
Co-Presenters: Steve Devoti, Dawn McCauley, Sabrina Messer
This session will with start with a brief overview of the process that was rolled out last October and share statistics to show how the process is working.
We will also go into more detail about what actually happens when a project is submitted and what interesting things have been learned by having projects reviewed by others.
We will describe some of the projects that have been successes, how we were able to match up people with software and vice versa and how it helped with creating some broader discussions of solutions.

Biography

Alan Silver is an IT professional in the department of chemistry. He currently serves as the chair for the Infrastructure Technical Advisory Group (ITAG). He has also been an IT professional on campus at Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) and the department of biostatistics. He has developed a broad scope of IT skills and is focused on creating a collaborative IT focus across campus colleagues.

Simcock, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Simcock

Email: elizabeth.simcock@wisc.edu

Address:
Division of Information Technology (DoIT)
Associate Director with Application Infrastructure Services

Elizabeth Simcock headshot

Biography

Elizabeth Simcock serves as an Associate Director with Application Infrastructure Services, leading the Web Platforms and Services space with the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology. This includes MyUW, WiscWeb, Web Hosting, KnowledgeBase, and in collaboration with Identity and Access Management, UW-Madison Profile. She worked previously with the School of Medicine and Public Health managing application development, and data and analytics.

She is a co-lead for the IT Leadership Development group, and a member of the planning committee for the 2025 Notre Dame AI Forum. She has served as a board member for HEDW (Higher Education Data World), chair of the UW IT Professionals Conference, and was a founding member of the UW IT Recognition Awards committee. In all of these spaces her goal is to shine light on the things that connect us and to find ways to keep improving our work and our time together. Her favorite IT community memory is taking the opportunity to ask a large room full of UW IT employees how many of them were responsible for a physical door.

2026 Sessions

Building Trust in IT: Competency, Sincerity, and Care, Made Practical
The Art of Adaptation: Real Stories of Navigating through Change

2025 Session

Take the next step in your career with UW-Women in IT

2019 Session

What on Earth is $acronym_of_campus_IT_unit?

Tate-Pederson, Sara

Sara Tate-Pederson

Credentials: (She/Her)

Email: sara.tate-pederson@wisc.edu

Address:
Division of Information Technology (DoIT)
Office of Cybersecurity
IT Policy Writer & Analyst

Biography

Dynamic IT leader and professional with 25+ years of experience, I currently serve in the role of Technical Compliance Manager with Computer-Aided Engineering at UW-Madison. I am also a co-lead for our campus IT Leaders Program (ITLP) Forward steering team as part of IT Connects, am a past co-lead and founding steering team member of our campus Women in IT (UW-WIT) community, and currently serve as past chair and steering team member on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Women+ in IT Peer Group (BTAA WIT+). Throughout my entire career I have been an active participant and facilitator on a wide variety of strategic initiatives that promote inclusion, equity, diversity, and belonging in the workplace. Outside of my service to the UW-Madison I enjoy opportunities to hike in our National Parks, indulge in hobby geology, and build with LEGO.

2023 Session

Meet IT Connects

2022 Sessions

Resources for (New and Existing) UW-Madison IT Professionals
Plugging into the IT Policy Process
IT Recognition Awards Ceremony

2021 Sessions

IT Policy Bootcamp – Live Session
IT Policy – What’s Hot and in the Hopper (Flash Talk)

2019 Session

What on Earth is $acronym_of_campus_IT_unit?

2018 Session

What it Means to be an IT Professional at UW-Madison – Continuing the Discussion

Thompson, Jesse

Jesse Thompson

Email: jesse.thompson@wisc.edu

Address:
Division of Information Technology (DoIT)

2019 Session

DMARC Pushing the Envelope

2018 Session

Title: Email Trust Issues? Find out why and what you can do to help.
Description:
Learn what UW-Madison is doing to improve email security and how campus IT professionals can help make email more secure.
This talk will focus on two areas: credentials are stolen causing the email service to be under constant attack, and domains are being spoofed which undermines the trust in our email.

Biography

Jesse has been on the UW-Madison email team since 2001. He spearheaded the implementation of anti-spam and reliable email delivery for university students, faculty, and staff. He monitors the anti-spam and email postmaster industry trends, old and new tactics, and emerging standards and best practices. He contributes to the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) and is the founding maintainer of the Anti-Phishing Email Reply (APER) project. After the team’s successful multi-year project to migrate the email service to Office 365 and consolidate the majority of email/calendaring systems across campus, Jesse is turning his attention to the next chapter of the UW-Madison email service: to fight the email forgery & phishing epidemic and improve the reputation of UW-Madison’s hundreds of email domains.

Thornton, Amanda

Amanda Thornton

Credentials: (She/Her)

Email: amanda.thornton@wisc.edu

Address:
Space Science & Engineering Center
Software Developer/Engineer

Biography

Amanda Thornton is a team lead and software developer supporting researchers and research administrators at the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center. She is a co-chair for Leadership Improv and UW Women in IT and organizes the DataWonks and the Distributed Developers Communities of Practice. She is committed to creating inclusive communities for everyone and received the 2020 UW-Madison CIO Award for Community Engagement. Outside of work, you’ll find Amanda at the rink teaching adults how to play ice hockey.

2026 Session

Normalizing Failure: How To Create Psychological Safety to Make Your Organization Successful

2025 Session

Take the next step in your career with UW-Women in IT

2024 Session

Empowering women at UW: Celebrating 10 years of Women in IT

2023 Sessions

IT Awards

2022 Sessions

Interactive Data Visualization in Python
CommunITea Presents Campus IT Organizations Drop-In Sessions
Developing Your IT Career: Progression, transition, or supervision?

2021 Session

IT Connects CommunITea – Networking Event
Lunchtime Communities of Practice (CoPs) Drop-In Session

2020 Session

Developers Coffee Hour

2019 Session

Exposing Impostor Syndrome: Answering the 5 Ws about Impostor Syndrome

Treige, Phyllis

Phyllis Treige

Address:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Associate Vice Chancellor for Experience Strategy and Design

Phyllis Treige Headshot

Biography

Phyllis Treige most recently served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Experience Strategy and Design at UC Santa Cruz, where she led experience and service design, digital accessibility, strategic communications, and change management as an integrated practice oriented around service delivery and supporting organizational change. Over fifteen years in higher education IT, including eleven years at UW-Madison, she has worked on the stubborn gap between what institutions deliver, even with the best of intentions, and what people actually need, and on the organizational conditions that have to shift for better outcomes to follow. She is returning to the UW this spring as Shared Capabilities Director with WEST.

2026 Session

The Art of Adaptation: Real Stories of Navigating through Change

2019 Session

SPRINT! Tackle big problems in a week

Vavrus, Mike

Mike Vavrus

Email: mike.vavrus@wisc.edu

Address:
Division of Information Technology (DoIT)
Systems Engineering & Operations

Mike Vavrus Headshot

2019 Session

Managing Databases in our Rapidly Changing Technology Landscape

Biography

Mike Vavrus has been working with data as a developer, database administrator and business analyst for his 20+ year career in IT, primarily working with enterprise administrative data. He has experience and knowledge with regard to data management principles and tools, and is familiar with security issues with regard to data management. He leads a team at UW Madison which includes database and data management tool technologists, which is dedicated to helping UW Madison effectively manage its data and databases.

Wahe, Stefan

Stefan Wahe

Credentials: (He/Him)

Address:
University of Illinois System
Digital Risk Office
Director of HIPAA Privacy & Security

Stefan Wahe Headshot

Biography

Stefan Wahe is Director of HIPAA Privacy & Security in the Digital Risk Office at the University of Illinois, where he leads initiatives focused on healthcare data privacy, regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and risk management across a complex academic and healthcare environment. Prior to joining the University of Illinois System, Stefan spent over two decades at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he held several senior IT and cybersecurity leadership roles. He served as Chief IT Director for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), the University’s Deputy Chief Information Officer, Director of Cybersecurity Risk Management, and the University’s HIPAA Security Officer.

Stefan is an active contributor to the higher education IT community, frequently presenting at regional and national conferences on the intersection of institutional strategy, cybersecurity, and data governance. His presentations focus on advancing enterprise IT leadership in complex academic environments, including aligning cybersecurity risk management with institutional priorities, developing effective IT governance frameworks, and driving organizational change across decentralized campuses. Drawing on his extensive leadership experience, he brings a strategic perspective to how IT organizations can enable research, teaching, and administrative missions while strengthening privacy, security, and compliance programs.

2026 Session

The Art of Adaptation: Real Stories of Navigating through Change

2022 Session

ITs Role in Data Privacy

2021 Session

IT Policy Bootcamp – Live Session

2020 Session

The Art of Influencing Change

2019 Session

System Categorization and Scoring Risk

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