Dr. Astrid S. Tuminez (pronounced too-MEE-nez) was appointed the seventh president of Utah Valley University in 2018. Born in a farming village in the Philippine province of Iloilo, she moved with her parents and siblings to the slums of Iloilo City when she was 2 years old, her parents seeking better educational opportunities for their children.

Her pursuit of education eventually took her to the United States, where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in international relations and Russian literature from Brigham Young University (1986). She later earned a master's degree from Harvard University in Soviet Studies (1988) and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science (1996). Before UVU, President Tuminez was an executive at Microsoft, where she led corporate, external, and legal affairs in Southeast Asia. She also served as vice dean of research at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She has worked in philanthropy and venture capital in New York City and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She serves on the boards of Carnegie Corporation of New York and Cambia Health Solutions, and on the advisory board of Zions Bank. She is the author of Russian Nationalism Since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy and many other publications. She and her husband, Jeffrey S. Tolk, have three children. In her spare time, she enjoys running, dancing, and traveling.

Christina Baum is the UVU VP of Digital Transformation. She’s a mother of three and lover of golf, skiing, and music. She officially began serving in her new role June 1, 2022. Baum studied history with a minor in business as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University (BYU) with the original goal of attending law school, but the course of her schooling changed, and she earned her MBA at Washington State. Since then, Baum has held several challenging positions, including solution manager of the database platform team at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and CIO at Ensign College (then called LDS Business College). Each position provided her with opportunities to learn, effect change, and dive deeper into the field of technology. In her prior position as AVP, Baum worked on end user technologies, the university website and mobile app, Data Warehouse, classroom technology, student computing, labs, and institutional research. Every project that the Dx department works on relates to UVU's vision of being inclusive, providing students with engaged and flexible learning opportunities, and helping them achieve their full potential. Students have different backgrounds and experiences, but Baum believes that technology can be the great equalizer as UVU helps provide access to all. Other plans for Dx include but are not limited to: bolstering the new UVU mobile app to make everything a student needs available on their mobile device; rebuilding the university website to make it easier to navigate; improving cellular coverage and the network on campus; and developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot for the service desk, so students can get answers to their questions during off hours. Down the road, the goal is to have recordings and transcriptions of class lectures that students can search via a chatbot to aid their studies.

“I feel like the next five years are going to be incredible,” Baum said. “I think we're going to have incredible growth in technology here. And I feel like it's a pivotal time for UVU. I think we're at that crossroads, really stepping on the gas and really launching this digital transformation even more than we already have.”

Laura Zemp is Senior Assistant Commissioner for Data Governance and Analytics at the Utah System of Higher Education. Her pronouns are she/her/hers. In this role, she and her team work with the public institutions to provide state-level analysis, research, and reporting related to higher education in Utah. She is also the IPEDS state level coordinator for 19 Utah institutions. Prior to this opportunity at the system office, she worked for LDS Business College (now Ensign College) where she streamlined campus data collection and reporting, developed rubrics for assessment of soft skills, and served as the Accreditation Liaison Officer which allowed her to work with all areas of the college. She enjoys collaborating across agencies and institutions to improve systems for students through the use of data. Laura has a Master’s of Science in Educational Psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she studied measurement and cognition while working with nontraditional students in the Women’s Center.

David Wingate received his BS and MS degrees in computer science from Brigham Young University in 2002 and 2004, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT from 2008-2010 with a joint appointment in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Computational Cognitive Science group in the Brain and Cognitive Science Department. From 2010-2012 he was a research scientist at MIT with a joint appointment in BCS and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. From 2012-2015 he was a research scientist at Analog Devices, Inc. in their machine learning group.

He is currently an associate professor of computer science at Brigham Young University, where he works at the intersection of machine learning and social science. His research leverages large-scale language models, such as chatgpt, to address pressing social problems like racism and political polarization.