The University of Colombia, US has appointed Sree Sreenivasan, who has been part of the varsity since 1992 and had been dean of student affairs since 2008, as its first chief digital officer.
Sreenivasan will work closely with schools, centres and academic departments, as well as the university's existing digital development groups such as Columbia's Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning.
In addition to his focus on online education, he will provide advisory services and programmes to schools, faculty and administrators on digital technology and social media.
For more than eight years, Sreenivasan served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV in New York and now occasionally appears on various television shows to talk tech.
He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Popular Science.
He is co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association -- a group of 1,000-plus journalists across the United States and Canada.
In March 2004, Newsweek magazine named him one of the nation's 20 most influential South Asians; and in 2009, AdAge named him 'one of 25 media people to follow on Twitter'.