Biography

Dr. Mark Koan is the Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Maricopa Community College District, a system comprising 10 colleges and 40 locations that serve more than 140,000 students each year and adds an estimated $7.2 billion annually to the region’s economy.

Guided by a lifelong passion for education, Dr. Koan is committed to an ambitious IT vision and focused execution to better serve students and transform the delivery of enterprise services across the district. Dr. Koan has a broad teaching background composed of secondary, post-secondary, graduate and international courses covering a wide range of subjects. He has also worked with a number of grants, including current awards from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. 

Dr. Koan has presented nationally and locally on a variety of topics including the use of enterprise systems to promote equitable student outcomes, enhancing the student experience through automation, and integrated systems for transforming the delivery of student services. Recently invited to present for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Koan was asked to speak about Maricopa’s innovative technology approach to student success with founder Bill Gates and his leadership team. In 2022, he was honored by CIO peers across the state as the Arizona CIO of the Year for the Public Sector. Under Dr. Koan’s leadership, Maricopa’s IT team earned a global innovation award for their rapid deployment of advanced unified communication technologies for district-wide instruction and operations at the start of the global pandemic and they were most recently selected as the 2021-2022 recipient of the Innovation of the Year Award by Maricopa and the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges.

Before serving as the CIO for the Maricopa Community Colleges, Dr. Koan was appointed as an Associate Vice Chancellor (AVC) to lead the district's technology transformation efforts, launching the first system-wide mobile application for students and leading the development of Maricopa’s first comprehensive data lake. In other capacities, he also served as an AVC responsible for the strategic and operational direction of Maricopa's enterprise infrastructure and customer care divisions. During his tenure as the CIO for Phoenix College, Dr. Koan and  his IT team won the Innovation of the Year Award for the Maricopa Community Colleges and deployed state-of-the-art technology solutions across the college. Prior to working for the Maricopa Community Colleges, Dr. Koan was an IT Director at Arizona State University where he led several diverse teams across multiple locations and was chosen to help develop and advance strategic alliances for ASU's University Technology Office, including work with key industry partners such as Google, Verizon and Amazon.

Dr. Koan earned his Doctorate of Education in Leadership and Innovation from Arizona State University (ASU). His dissertation focused on the development of communities of practice across organizations. He also received his Master of Arts from ASU, completed his undergraduate work at Northern Arizona University and earned his Associate’s Degree from Phoenix College.