Suneetha Vaitheswaran named first University Data Officer at Princeton

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Suneetha Vaitheswaran, a data analytics expert, has been named Princeton University’s first University Data Officer. She began in her new role on Feb. 28, according to a lapress release from the Ivy League university.

Vaitheswaran is a a senior leader in analytics strategy, systems consulting and data governance, and in her new position, she will be responsible for supporting the effective use of administrative data at Princeton, reporting to Jay Dominick, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, and Provost Deborah Prentice.

“Suneetha comes to us with an impressive career in higher education leading important data initiatives. I look forward to working with her in developing Princeton’s future data infrastructure,” Dominick is quoted saying in the press release.

Vaitheswaran, principal of Suneetha LLC since 2019, has held leadership roles focusing on higher education for most of her career. She was executive director of analytics and business information solutions at the University of Chicago from 2016 to 2018, and before that had served as director of business information services at the university for more than eight years.

At Northwestern University, Vaitheswaran worked for more than a decade, as a project manager from 1993 to 2004, and then as assistant director of data warehousing from 2004 to 2007.

At Princeton, Vaitheswaran will work closely with Princeton’s data managers, analysts, and IT professionals and will be a key player in establishing and sustaining a campus-wide data governance infrastructure.

“There’s an interesting pivot point happening at Princeton, which makes this position very exciting,” Vaitheswaran said in the press release. “There’s an institutional focus on data and in regard to information systems and platforms, which is creating an opportunity to look at data more holistically, bring it together in more seamless ways, and incorporate processes to manage the data so that it can be used more effectively for strategic decision-making.”

Early in her career, Vaitheswaran, worked  as a systems engineer and semiconductor engineer at IBM. She earned her bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Northwestern University.