Scott F. Midkiff

Dr. Scott Midkiff has served as the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Virginia Tech since October 2012. In this role, Dr. Midkiff has responsibility for Virginia Tech’s overall strategy and vision for information technology to support and advance the university’s three-part mission of teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement. He leads the Division of Information Technology which provides: IT services and infrastructure for teaching and learning; advanced research computing services including high-performance computing, large-scale storage, visualization, and compliance-based compute and storage environments; network, telecommunications, and enterprise computing infrastructure and services; enterprise administrative systems; IT security; identity and access management; email and other collaborative tools; user support; procurement and licensing for software and IT services; and IT policies, standards, and guidelines. The Division of IT is also the home of the Virginia Cyber Range and the U.S. Cyber Range which provide environments and other resources for cybersecurity education for K-12 schools, community colleges, and universities. Dr. Midkiff is a member of the boards of the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation, the Virginia Tech Innovation Corporation, and the Roanoke Broadband Authority.

Dr. Midkiff is a Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Midkiff was the Electrical and Computer Engineering department head. As a professor at Virginia Tech, Dr. Midkiff conducts research in wireless networks, mobile systems, and pervasive computing. Dr. Midkiff has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in networking, wireless networks and mobile systems, network applications, telecommunications, and other areas of electrical and computer engineering and computer science. He contributed to the creation of Virginia Tech’s Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and the online Master of Information Technology program.

From September 2006 until September 2009, Dr. Midkiff was on assignment at the National Science Foundation. While at the NSF, Dr. Midkiff served as a Program Director for the Integrative, Hybrid and Complex Systems program in the Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems Division in the Directorate for Engineering. He was one of the three co-lead program directors to establish the Cyber-Physical Systems initiative, first announced in September 2008. Dr. Midkiff received an NSF Director’s Award for Collaborative Innovation in 2008.

Dr. Midkiff has prior experience at Bell Laboratories (1979-1982) and at IBM (Summer 1977, Summer 1978). He was a visiting research associate at Carnegie Mellon University (1985-1986).

Dr. Midkiff received the B.S.E. degree, summa cum laude, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University (1979), the M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (1980), and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University (1985). He was an MCNC Fellow during his Ph.D. studies at Duke. Dr. Midkiff is a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the Society for Cable Telecommunications Engineers. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu, and Omega Alpha honorary societies. Dr. Midkiff has served as a program evaluator for the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET since 2011.