Biography

Rich Mendola has served as the Enterprise Chief Information Officer at Emory since 2005 and also served as interim Executive Vice President for Business and Administration from March 2015 through August 2015.  Rich serves on multiple technology advisory boards and is the President of the RHEDcloud software foundation, which promotes secure cloud computing in research, healthcare and education.

Rich’s early focus at Emory was on enabling synergy and innovation across the academic and healthcare information technology functions.  Rich and his leadership team consolidated the major University IT functions and created new research, information security and information architecture units.   In 2012, Rich created a new center for digital scholarship.

Rich and his team also worked to better leverage the University and Healthcare IT partnership.  The academic and clinical areas at Emory share common networks, voice systems, data centers, storage platforms, email and communication systems and information security functions.  Across the two domains, the data management groups work closely to leverage clinical data for research.

Rich’s current priorities include leveraging cloud technologies, enabling more data analytics across the enterprise, and aligning the activities of the IT organization with Emory’s latest strategic themes.

Rich began his academic career as a faculty member in the health sciences at the University of Connecticut’s Health Science Center. He served in a variety of healthcare, academic and administrative leadership roles at the University of Connecticut and the University of Illinois before joining Emory.