Biography

Joe Licata is currently a Product Management Consultant for the Maricopa County Community Colleges District and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success team through his business, Canyon GBS. He is also a part-time faculty member at Saint Leo University and former part-time faculty member at Phoenix College. Joe is also the Founder and Executive Director of Arizona Educates, a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on advancing higher education in the state of Arizona. Arizona Educates is focused on improving opportunities for fair economic and social mobility within Arizona. To realize that mission, they conduct economic research, perform public policy analysis and provide direct student support. Educates, a non-profit serving post-secondary education. 

Until June, 2022, Joe served as the former Associate Chief Information Officer and Head of Product for Academic Technology in the IT Services department at Maricopa Community Colleges for several years. During his tenure there he was responsible for the strategy and operation over a wide range of product services used by the ten colleges that make up this District. Before Maricopa, Joe built education technology as the Sr. Product Manager at Learning Objects, later acquired by Cengage, where he helped build an innovative competency-based learning management system known as Difference Engine. And immediately prior to that, Joe spent several years as the Associate Director of Learning Solutions at the University of Maryland Global Campus, where he oversaw the work of the learning solutions team he helped establish from the ground up. All-in-all, Joe has spent the last 12 in higher education leadership.

Joe holds a Juris Doctorate in Law from the University of Maryland, a Master of Science in Management, and an MBA, from University of Maryland Global Campus, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Florida, and an Associate in Arts from Miami Dade College. Joe also has several industry recognized certifications including: ITIL Foundations, CompTIA Project+, CompTIA Strata IT, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and Six Sigma (Black Belt). Joe has also had several notable speaking engagements including panelist opportunities and sponsored events with the Chronicle of Education where he spoke on the role of IT in Higher Education. He has also been named the EDUCAUSE Rising Start for 2022.