Biography

Mark A. Staples is the Sr. Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the College of Charleston and serves as the senior IT professional at the College. His focus has been modernizing the technologies to provide the College with the tools to be more innovative and transformative - leading to improved student and employee experiences.
 
Before his appointment at the College of Charleston, Mark was the Vice President/CIO at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Massachusetts, serving as a member of the President's Administrative Council and reporting directly to the president of the Institute. He is responsible for IT Strategy, infrastructure services, administrative systems, and technologies and practices influencing teaching and learning. Mark also provides leadership in marketing, student recruitment and retention, institutional analytics, alumni affairs, and institutional advancement, leveraging his 29 years of experience in higher education. He served as the chair of the Education Roundtable for the Boston chapter of the Society of Information Management. In 2015 he was nominated for Boston CIO of the Year in the non-profit sector, and in 2016, he finished as a finalist among more than 70 other CIOs.

Before his time at Wentworth, Mark served as Director of Academic and Research Technologies across all nine colleges for Northeastern University, where he was responsible for delivering and supporting all teaching, learning, and research technologies on all campuses. His peers awarded Mark the Excellence/Innovation Award in 2012. He has also served as Chief Information Security Officer at Georgia Health Sciences University, Director of Infrastructure Services and Client Support at the Medical University of Ohio, and was part of various IT organizations at the University of Toledo and Indiana University (IU) for over ten years. Between 2009 and 2012, Mark also served as co-chair of a biomedical consortium that included Harvard Medical, UMass, Tufts University, MIT, and several biomedical labs throughout the commonwealth.

Mark's previous service included leadership in a consortium of research universities in the University System of Georgia. He also provided leadership in a collaborative to support disaster recovery and business continuity support between the five research universities in the University System of Georgia. Mark has also influenced new software licensing strategies with major vendors, using collaboration and crowdsourcing tools, and has been involved in cybersecurity initiatives with the Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC).

He was an adjunct faculty member in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, teaching both in the classroom for the undergraduate MIS program and online for the executive MBA program. He was voted Favorite Professor in 2012. More than just a technology leader, Mark is a thought leader in the business of higher education. His ability to converge technology to create a transformative impact on revenue and operational efficiencies. Mark has also established a reputation for bridging the gap between technology and the rest of the institution, fostering a culture in which technology is thoroughly integrated with every aspect of the institutional mission, reinforcing rather than complicating institutional objectives. Mark's contributions to the field through publications and presentations span a broad range of topics, including IT culture and leadership, the impact of social media on knowledge management and communities of practice, organizational change and design, mobile technology, effective budgeting in higher education, and the digital revolution's impact on the teaching and learning mission of higher education. 

Mark's doctoral research investigates the sustainability of higher education given the rapidly changing technological landscape, highlighting where technology has failed to live up to its potential and identifying the necessary cultural and fiscal steps required for a transformative use of technology in an educational context.

Mark has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees at the University of Toledo Alumni Association, serving on the Communications and Outreach subcommittees. Away from work, Mark has been a radio personality, the producer of a weekly syndicated television program, and has owned and operated a recording studio, producing and engineering music and voiceover production. Mark has also been a concert and music festival promoter and spent several years as a college and high school sports official for football, basketball, baseball, and volleyball.