From Melody's Desk

September 11, 2019

Dear Colleagues,

As you’ve probably been aware, we have been searching for an AVP for Financial Strategy and an AVP for Financial Operations and Controller as well as working on staffing for Finance Strategic Transformation (FST). I’m pleased to tell you the names of some of the talented people who will be joining our team, as well as several organizational shifts. All of these moves are part of our efforts to create a finance eco-system and team that strengthens the University’s foundation as imagined in President Ryan’s 2030 Plan and will help propel the UVA to be both great and good.

It’s great to be able to share so much good news at once!

AVP of Financial Strategy

After a comprehensive search, we chose Bill Ashby for this position. Bill will come to us from the Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy where he is currently Senior Associate Dean for Administration, effective September 30. Bill’s 18 years of leadership at UVA will serve us well as we transform our financial team and strengthen our partnerships with the University Community.

In this re-imagined leadership role, Bill will take the lead to build out UVAFinance’s reporting and analytics strategy, to strengthen our partnership support model to better serve UVA’s stakeholders from the Board and foundations to fiscal administrators both today and in the post-FST world, and to manage our internal administration for UVAFinance. Finance Outreach & Compliance (Kelly Hochstetler), the Administrative Services Group (Judy DiVita), and Foundations (Phil Porter) will report to Bill. Bill will work very closely with the Office of Financial Planning & Analysis, Treasury, Financial Operations, and the Financial Strategic Transformation team to achieve these objectives.

Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) Team

We’ve filled several critical FST roles, as we move into the Phase 2 Readiness activities:

• Nicole Ferretti, who has served for 4 years as the Assistant Vice President for Financial Planning & Analysis, has accepted a full-time position as the Financial Lead. Nicole will take on this leadership role with the project, effective immediately.
• Onyi Odumosu has joined the FST project team as Senior Project Manager on September 3. Onyi has over 15 years of project management and technical leadership experience, including the Epic implementation at UVA Medical Center, and she comes to us most recently from UVA’s Emily Couric Cancer Center.
• Elissa Morton, Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at the College of Arts and Sciences, will serve as lead for the Budgeting and Planning Workstream.
• Allison Holt, Controller for the Office of Finance at the School of Medicine, and Thomas Schneeberger, Director of Financial Reporting in Financial Reporting & Operations, will serve as co-leads of the Chart of Accounts/Foundation Data Model Workstream.

We’re grateful to have Nicole, Onyi, Elissa, Allison and Thomas in these key roles, bringing their expertise, experience, and varied perspectives to the team as we seek the best talent to ensure success with FST.

Office of Financial Planning & Analysis (OFPA)

With Nicole transitioning to the FST project, Brian Logwood will lead the OFPA as Managing Director, effective immediately. Brian, who joined UVA in March, has over 20 years of public policy and financial planning experience with the Commonwealth of Virginia, most recently serving as an Associate Director in the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget for the finance, administration, and technology divisions.

Risk Management

After the spring retirement of Rick Schupp, Julie Richardson has taken on leadership of the Treasury and Risk Management functions as Managing Director. Day-to-day responsibilities for risk management will continue to be managed by KristenDinwiddie for Claims, and Debbie Hinton for Insurance and Advice.

Other UVAFinance Updates

The search for an AVP of Financial Operations and Controller is going well, with assistance provided from the Isaacson Miller search firm. We hope to complete this search within the two months.

The search for a Technical Lead for FST is in its final stages; we hope to make an announcement on that position very soon.

Additional positions for FST Phase 2 will be posted in Workday later this month, with Phase 3 positions planned for mid-October. If you’re interested in these roles, I encourage you to check out James Gorman’s recent posting in the online Community!

Please join me in welcoming these changes to the UVAFinance and FST project teams. Every carefully chosen team member builds our capacity to continually improve, transform for the better, and build an inspiring future. We still have more opportunities to participate, and I look forward to seeing how this already-awesome team in UVAFinance works together to bring about positive change.

Thank you for all you do!

Melody