Biography

James R. “Jim” Bottum was named Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer for Computing and Information Technology at Clemson University on July 17, 2006.

Mr. Bottum leads Clemson’s efforts to build a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure for education, research and service. In his first year on the job, he was able to bring Clemson into the Top 100 supercomputing sites in the world and link Clemson to the national research infrastructure through a privately gifted optical fiber network representing South Carolina’s first direct link for higher education.

Before coming to Clemson University, Mr. Bottum was Purdue University's first Chief Information Officer (CIO) beginning in August of 2001. His leadership at Purdue was recognized in a 2005 report by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research in the case study, A New Model for Supporting Research at Purdue University, and also in Newsweek as well as a cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Before arriving at Purdue, Mr. Bottum was Executive Director for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves on number of national committees including the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure which he chairs and is a member of the Internet 2 Board of Trustees.

In December 2006, Mr. Bottum was selected as one of Computerworld Magazine’s 100 Premier IT Leaders for 2007. He was one of a small number of academic CIO’s in the list of mostly private sector IT leaders.