Recent Operations and F&A Teams Achievements
The joint meeting of the Operations Division and Finance and Administration Division staffs on April 2, 2025, included recognition of recent major successes by the divisions’ teams. Those successes are listed below (click on the circles to the right to see each team's achievements). Congratulations to everyone involved on these achievements, and thanks for your great work.
Operations Teams Successes
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Renovations to Bartlett Dining Hall restored the façade, upgraded the mechanical ventilation system, and repaired skylights and the roof of the building, built in 1901.
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The Botany Pond was restored to enhance the wildlife habitat, aquatic plantings, and landscape with structural improvements to the bridge, a new biological filtration system, and improved pedestrian access and gathering spaces.
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A new athletic field was constructed at Woodlawn Charter School that includes a jogging track, long and triple jumps, goal posts, fencing, a scoreboard, lighting, and outdoor exercise equipment.
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The pavement system across the main historic main quad was replaced with a pervious paver and drainage system, improving accessibility and creating a more durable and sustainable pathway.
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The John W. Boyer Center in Paris completed the construction of a five-story, 25,000 square foot facility to house the International Institute of Research in Paris.
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The University was awarded Energy Star Partner of the Year for four consecutive years
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The Benefits team re-negotiated 12 benefit plans resulting in significant savings for the University. They also supported employees who elected the Voluntary Staff Retirement Incentive Plan.
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Talent Acquisition transitioned from the hiring freeze to a more automated position control process that links UCPlan and Workday, allowing them to easily monitor if units have budgeted for positions.
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The University and the SEIU L73 concluded our third collective bargaining agreement, a five-year agreement, after nine months of negotiations.
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After 18 months of planning, and collaboration across all HR teams, deans and officers, and units, we prepared the University for the Illinois Pay Transparency legislation, which took effect January 1.
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We introduced a new business process within Workday to capture alternative work locations for all fully remote employees.
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We launched a hiring manager training to educate hiring managers and interviewers on interviewing best practices, processes, and resources available to them with 141 managers trained thus far.
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The Networking Team successfully completed the multi-year network modernization upgrade. This was a major capital project that updated 550 network closets in more than 150 buildings. More than 2000 network switches and more than 8000 wireless access points were installed for a greatly improved campus network experience.
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The Networking and Communications teams partnered to transition the University to Eduroam and to retire the uchicago-secure wireless network.
The Infrastructure and Operations team completed the Mainframe Data Migration and Retirement project, saving $750,000 in annual costs. After more than 40 years, the mainframe was shutdown in February. -
The PhoenixAI Team completed two releases that added new features, including an additional AI model, custom chatbots, the ability to create private chats, and perform image analysis.
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The Center for Digital Accessibility and the Learning Design Team in Academic Technology Solutions deployed two enterprise accessibility tools for Canvas (PopeTech and SensusAccess) to help users and content editors strengthen the accessibility of course materials.
The Department of Safety and Security recently held its annual awards banquet. During the event, the following employees received the department's highest honors.
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2024 DSS Civilian Employee of the Year: Stella Wu, Occupational Health and Safety Specialist
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2024 University of Chicago Police Department Officer of the Year: Angel Martinez, UCPD Detective
Finance and Administration Teams Successes
The Commercial Real Estate Operations Team continues to catalyze a vibrant 53rd Street Corridor. Successes this year include:
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The development of Hyde Park Labs, a multi-tenant commercial laboratory building opening this summer. The building will include a full floor of University researchers from PME as well faculty start-up companies at the UChicago Science incubator.
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Opening of new restaurants and businesses, including Five Rabinitos, Cantina Rosa, La Boulangerie, and Mahari
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The payables team managed through the FST integrations, clearing backlogs to get suppliers loaded and vendors paid.
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The procurement team extended themselves to help support payables in addition to our regularly scheduled procurement program
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John Hillesland was awarded the John W. Rogers, Jr. Business Diversity Impact Award.
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Payroll successfully implemented the new collective bargaining agreements, which required extensive coordination across departments and attention to detail.
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The University finished its FY2024 audit having addressed all of the findings from 2023 and built up our audit practices to increase collaboration with campus partners and affiliates.
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The University's bond transaction this year won Midwest Bond Buyer Deal of the Year and contributed the largest source of gap closing in fiscal year 2025. The University was able to maintain its ratings thanks to the development of our financial stabilization plan.
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Risk Management executed a difficult renewal that continues to protect the University while mitigating cost impacts.
- The Training Center helped clear a significant backlog of help tickets in the SSO-P2P-Payment-Support-2nd-Level assignment group, reducing the ticket volume to a service-level agreement of two business days.