About College of Informatics: Northern Kentucky University, Greater Cincinnati Region

Our Mission: We enable students and the region to thrive in an age of innovation and digital transformation.

Message from the Dean

Welcome to the College of Informatics. And welcome to a new way of looking at the world.

Informatics is all about seeking human meaning in a world of data. It is how we find, process, protect, and share information. It encompasses journalism, cybersecurity, public relations, business analytics, artificial intelligence, and much more.

Fast computation on massive data made mobile and social has changed our lives. Informatics is all about those earthshaking changes.

But it goes beyond that. Information is personal, organizational, and global. It is the cold logic of computer code, but it is also the passion of persuasion. It is logic on fire.

We built our college on the radical premise that breaking a few silos would yield growth and innovation. That has happened.

Our Data Science program was the first in the world to be ABET-accredited. We are an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Cyber Defense Education and offer an accelerated online master’s program in Cybersecurity designed to meet the needs of career-changers. Our Journalism program and the independent student newspaper The Northerner partner with LINKnky to advance local news coverage. Our media students bring their documentary filmmaking skills to countries from Guatemala to Sri Lanka.

And Informatics, where computation meets communication, is the epicenter of artificial intelligence.

As an outward-facing college, we bring media and tech talent to companies, local governments, and K-12. Many of our degrees have built-in experiential “outside the classroom” components. Our students are winning awards, competitions, and hackathons, and are graduating into the world with that special “informatics” edge.

No matter what your interests or background, come join us as we explore and create.

Informatics: What We Are

Embedded: We are inextricably interlinked with the networks of our region-networks of employers, innovators, schools, and even the other colleges of our university. We are symbiotic, not independent, in this ecosystem. This linkage is important because the world is grappling with information: gathering it, processing it, sharing it, protecting it. We foster talent, and we benefit from talent. We find our success in how our part in this symbiosis helps others in the ecosystem thrive.

Responsible: The digital world is fragile, unstable, hackable for good and for evil, hovering at the edge of comprehension. The innovations we call "tech" can threaten our privacy, empower forces of hate, and put our physical survival at risk. At this point in time, it is insufficient, and even reckless, to graduate students with merely the appropriate skill sets. It is a moral imperative to ensure that our students understand the broad implications of their subjects of study and the consequences of their endeavors. This requires a very specific focus on ethics and social responsibility in informatics. In our teaching and research, we will critically address these challenges.

Different: The umbrella of informatics spreads over a diverse group of creators, scholars, and learners. We have many voices. The conjunction of communication, business, and computing produces weird and novel interactions, and we embrace the strangeness that society has imputed to our digital creative/critical subculture and are not afraid to subvert its norms. There is a home for all here. And the world needs more of us.

Office of the Dean

Kevin Kirby

Dean,
College of Informatics

GH 500B
859-572-6544
kirby@nku.edu

Stephanie Klatzke, Ph.D.

Associate Dean,
Associate Professor

GH 500D
859-572-6903
klatzkes1@nku.edu

Larissa Heck

Manager,
Communication, Events, & Administration

GH 500A
859-572-5666
heckl3@nku.edu

COI Advisory Board

Heather Ackles
Director Business Technology
School Outfitters
Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority

Jay Becker
Founder and President
BLDG Brands

Shannan Boyer
President and Founder
Scooter Media

Lee Crume
President and CEO
Be-NKY

Ife Oluwa Osifalujo
President
COI Ambassadors

Christin Godale
Director, Life Sciences
Cincy Tech

Matt Godsted
Cybersecurity Strategy Architect
Kroger

Tim Hanner
President and CEO
Educate NKY

Rick Huff
CIO
Paycor

Brian Keys
Vice President of Technology
Cincinnati Reds

Julie L. McGehee

VP, Compensation and Benefits
Corporate Secretary
The E.W. Scripps Co.

Gregory S. Shumate
Attorney
Frost Brown Todd LLC

John R. Ward
Senior VP & CIO
TriHealth Information Systems

About COI