Biography

Carlyn Chatfield joined Cornell University as an IT Technical Communicator in January 2024. She uses her storytelling, community building, and higher ed IT communications experience to shape web content and service announcements for the CIT staff and affiliated IT units across the Cornell system. In July 2024, she accepted a leadership role in the IT Communications (ITComm) Community Group.

Before leaving Rice University, she developed an alumni outreach initiative for the Computer Science (CS) Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas by telling the stories of CS alumni in web sites and social media and organizing events to connect alumni with each other and current CS students and faculty. She also worked as the department's Publicist.

Her greatest impact in EDUCAUSE occurred during the 12 years she spent managing communications for the Office of Information Technology at Rice. While working in OIT, she introduced popular programs like Joe ITguy on Facebook and student IT Ambassadors in each residential college at Rice.

She was active in leading the IT Communications (ITCOMM) Constituent Group and remained an ex-officio member of the ITCOMM Cabinet. Her passion for connecting members of the ITCOMM CG drove her to create and lead monthly virtual coffee shop sessions for four years.

When she accepted the role of ITCOMM CG co-leader in 2014, she established a cabinet to advise the group's co-leaders and recruited peers to serve on the ITCOMM Cabinet. Carlyn and her co-leader, Cathy McVey of Miami University, worked with the ITCOMM Cabinet to open leadership development opportunities within the CG, place two-year term limits on the co-leader roles, design a continual co-leadership mentoring process, publish a CG charter, and execute succession plans to continue the promotion of leaders from within the membership of the CG.

Since 1987, she has worked in higher education for proprietary, public, and private institutions in roles spanning admission, financial aid, business analysis, and information technology (IT) and academic department initiatives. She was a licensed Zumba(R) instructor for 11 years, and she authored the book "Financial Aid 101" for Thompsons/Peterson's. Carlyn completed her BBA in Marketing, summa cum laude, at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.