Jean Boland
Biography
Jean Boland is the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Morrisville State College. During her tenure, Morrisville State College became the first of the State University of New York's 64 colleges to become a “ThinkPad University” with the implementation of a laptop program for students in the fall of 1998. In 1999, Morrisville State College became one of the first colleges in the nation to offer wireless access to the Internet and campus network, creating a nomadic learning environment for students. For two consecutive years, Morrisville State College earned the distinction of being named “America's Most-Wired College” by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine's prestigious college survey. In 2003, Morrisville State College became the first college in the United States to comprehensively replace all landline phones in the residence halls with a Nextel cell phone for every student resident. In the fall of 2007, Morrisville in partnership with Meru Networks, deployed the first enterprise-wide 802.11n wireless network, creating the fastest wireless network in the world. The college's technology initiatives prompted the New York Times to call Morrisville State College, “a college at the forefront of a technological revolution”.Boland has been invited to present at several national and international conferences, including the 2nd Europe, Middle East and Africa ThinkPad University Fly-In in Dubai, UAE, the United Kingdom's higher education conference on Educational Computing in the 21st Century and Wireless Communications for the 21st century in London, England, the annual conference for the Global Wireless Education Consortium, and the 33rd annual conference and strategic leadership forum for ACUTA, the international Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education.
Boland serves on the Sprint Higher Education Advisory Board and on the ACUTA Higher Education Advisory Panel. Boland is the co-author of a chapter in Ubiquitous Computing: The Universal Use of Computers on College Campuses.
Prior to Morrisville State College, Boland was a Manager of Systems Development at General Electric. Boland previously held software development positions at Hewlett-Packard Company and the State University of New York at Delhi. Boland has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer and Information Studies from Colgate University and an M.B.A. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.).