In early January, Nick Dugan was appointed chief information officer (CIO) for UC Merced by Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz. Dugan is the first CIO at Merced to hold a vice chancellor title and sit on the chancellor’s cabinet.
In a statement announcing Dugan’s new position, Muñoz said, “[Dugan’s] effective management through a number of IT challenges, his proactive work with partners across campus and contributions to our post-pandemic workforce planning, along with his passion for lifelong learning and servant-leadership, have commended him to the university’s senior leadership team, and we welcome him to the Cabinet.”
The UCIT blog team is honored to take this opportunity to share this news and some background on Dugan’s 22-year career in Information Technology (IT) at the University of California (UC).
12 years at UC Merced
In 2010, just five short years after the UC Merced was founded in 2005, Dugan joined the campus as a computing system support specialist for the School of Engineering. Over the course of his career, he assumed a number of leadership roles in the Office of Information Technology (OIT): (1) he was UC Merced’s first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), leading efforts to secure information systems and develop campus IT policy; (2) he moved into the role of Deputy Chief Information Officer in 2016, with the responsibility of managing enterprise information systems and expanding the campus network via the “Merced 2020 Project”; (3) and he served as the interim Chief Information Officer since March 2022.
22 years working at the University of California started as a student at UC Santa Cruz
Dugan’s UC career began as a student worker in 1998 while completing his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz. He took his first staff position in 2001, supporting research computing in the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering. Between 2001 and 2010, he held several IT roles at UC Santa Cruz and then UC Davis before moving to UC Merced. It was while working at UC Merced that he received his master’s degree in information management from Arizona State University.
A Place of Firsts
As a long-time resident of the San Joaquin Valley, Dugan feels a deep connection to the mission of higher education and to the UC Merced campus in particular. He says, “As a local high school student in the 1990s, I was heavily influenced and intrigued by the competition to secure a home for, and begin building, the 10th UC campus. Some 25 years later, the fruits of that labor have been realized as most of our incoming students this year have always lived in a world where UC Merced exists. It is the honor of my career to continue my work as the first Vice Chancellor for Information Technology in this place of ‘firsts’ for myself and so many others!”
Dugan is looking forward to the opportunity to further connect with the UC Tech community. Learn more about Dugan through his Diversity Statement.
UC IT Blog editor’s note: with special appreciation to Christy Snyder, UC Merced, for her valued input on this announcement.