Michael Cato

Michael Cato is currently the SVP & CIO at Bowdoin College. Prior to this, they served as the VP for Computing & Information Services and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Vassar College from September 2013 to February 2018. In this role, they led Vassar's Information Technology (IT) strategy and operations, including academic computing, technical infrastructure, faculty and staff support, student computing resources, and administrative information systems.

Under Michael's leadership, Vassar initiated an intentional organizational culture program to increase collaboration and innovation by addressing issues such as trust and transparency. This multi-year effort included facilitated workshops, organization-wide engagements, and small group experiences. Additionally, Michael led the adoption of new approaches to better serve the college community including Project Management methodologies and IT Service Management principles. Michael also successfully led migration from Ellucian Banner ERP to Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance, with the new systems live as of March and July 2017 respectively. As part of this process, they negotiated a relationship with Workday to contribute to the development of Workday Student and position the college to consider it as a possible successor to Banner Student.

In addition to their work at Vassar, Michael has also been involved in several other notable projects. Michael led CIS to successfully receive $633,000 in 2014 through two Campus Cyberinfrastructure: Infrastructure, Innovation Engineering (CC*IIE) grants from the National Science Foundation. Michael also implemented a Cloud 1st strategy to increase organizational agility and responsiveness by decreasing dependence on internal hardware, development and implementation resources. Lastly, they negotiated partnerships through the New York State High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC2) and membership in the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to provide significantly greater computational resources for research and teaching than are available through campus resources.

Michael Cato holds an MBA in Business Administration from Wake Forest University and a BS in Zoology from Andrews University. Michael is a certified EDUCAUSE Nominations Advisory Committee Member for 2019.

Michael Cato reports to Clayton S. Rose, President. Michael Cato works with Matthew P. Orlando - SVP for Finance and Administration & Treasurer, Stephanie B. Frost - SVP, Development & Alumni Relations, and Niles Bryant - SVP & Chief Investment Officer. Some direct reports include Heather Rankin - Information Technology Project Manager, Sherri Braxton - Senior Director for Digital Innovation, Information Technology.