Manning CICS Expands Leadership Structure to Support Growth, Operations, and Community
New associate dean roles will strengthen college operations and advance community, equity, and belonging.
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As the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst continues to grow, Dean Keith Marzullo has announced two newly created leadership roles designed to strengthen the college’s operations and support a connected, welcoming community.
Distinguished Professor James Allan has been appointed the inaugural senior associate dean of operations, beginning in July. Senior Teaching Faculty Jaime Dávila has been appointed the inaugural associate dean of community, equity, and belonging, beginning September 1, 2026.
Together, the roles reflect an evolving leadership structure designed to support the college’s next phase of growth. While the positions are distinct in scope, both will help ensure that CICS has the systems, relationships, and shared sense of purpose needed to advance its mission of excellence in computing education, research, and community engagement.
“As CICS grows, the college needs greater clarity, capacity, and coordination across operations, while continuing to invest in the community and culture that allows students, faculty, and staff to do their best work,” said Marzullo.]
Strengthening college operations
As senior associate dean of operations, Allan will help coordinate and guide key areas of college administration, including operational planning, facilities and IT hardware, finance and research administration, and academic human resources, working closely with staff and faculty leaders to support day-to-day decision-making, long-range planning, and large-scale initiatives across the college.
The new position is intended to clarify leadership and coordination across several operational areas that support the college’s teaching, research, and service missions. In the role, Allan will also help convene staff directors, surface operational needs and challenges, and support planning as the college’s facilities, systems, staffing, and academic programs continue to evolve.
“I look forward to serving the college, its faculty, its staff, and its students in these complicated times,” said Allan. “I hope to foster a collaborative approach to identifying and solving problems and finding and implementing solutions, whether they address organization, teaching, or research.”
Allan joined the UMass Amherst computer science faculty in 1996 and has since held several leadership roles within the college, including as graduate program director, master's program director, chair of the faculty, and, most recently, as the associate dean of research and engagement. He also directs the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval.
His research focuses on information retrieval, event-based information organization, minimally interactive retrieval and organization, novelty in retrieval algorithms, methods for recognizing controversial or misleading information in text on the internet, and methods for finding and understanding the mechanisms learned by deep learning models. He has served in leadership roles across the information retrieval research community, including as chair of SIGIR and as an associate editor for ACM’s Transactions on Information Systems and Elsevier’s Information Processing and Management.
“James brings deep institutional knowledge and a long record of service to CICS,” Marzullo said. “He understands the college from multiple perspectives—as a faculty member, researcher, center director, department chair, and associate dean—and I am grateful that he will bring that experience to this new role.”
Advancing community, equity, and belonging
As associate dean of community, equity, and belonging, Dávila will provide leadership for efforts that support a welcoming, inclusive, and connected college community. In this role, he will work with students, faculty, staff, and college leaders to help strengthen belonging and participation across CICS.
Dávila will also help guide the college’s community-building efforts, including building on work led by Erika Dawson Head and the Office of Community, Outreach, and Organizational Learning (COOL). His work will include supporting college-wide conversations, programs, and practices that help students thrive, strengthen connections across the college, and reinforce CICS’s commitment to broad participation in computing.
“At CICS, belonging is how excellence is achieved,” Marzullo said. “The best ideas emerge when people with different experiences and perspectives are able to participate fully. The creation of this role reflects our commitment to building a college community where everyone has the opportunity to thrive and to contribute to computing for the common good.”
Dávila said he hopes his work will help every member of the college community feel that they belong in CICS, that every space is a space they can enter, and that their contributions are valuable and appreciated.
“This takes genuine effort from each and every one of us,” Dávila said. “As with teaching, I come to this work convinced that while it’s not always easy, we can do it, and that it’s important that we do it together.”
The new role builds on Dávila’s experience as an educator, mentor, and community builder. He joined CICS in 2019 after 20 years as a professor of computer science at Hampshire College, where he carried out peer-reviewed research on Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing, and served as Special Presidential Assistant for Diversity and Multicultural Education for seven years
An award-winning educator, Dávila received the 2024 College Outstanding Teaching Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching across UMass Amherst’s colleges. His work as an educator has focused on introductory computer science curricula, dialogic approaches to classroom teaching, and helping students build strong foundations in computing.
For Dávila, the work of belonging is central to the future of computing.
“Within computing, this work helps ensure that our discipline encompasses the breadth and richness of perspectives needed to move it forward, and that computing serves as a path toward better lives for everyone in our society,” Dávila said. “I have seen, through both personal and professional conversations and experiences, how often members of our communities are still blocked from pathways toward advancement. I am humbled by the success of everyone who has fought and persevered, and I am committed to helping every member of our community reach their full potential.”
Among his priorities, Dávila hopes to build on the success of the COOL office, continue working with faculty on teaching practices that support student success and belonging, develop programming that helps students connect with the college outside the classroom, support best practices in recruitment and retention, and communicate the college’s commitment to community, equity, and belonging to internal and external audiences.
“Jaime has long demonstrated the qualities that this role requires: care for students, respect for colleagues, and a deep understanding of how important it is for people to see themselves in computing,” said Marzullo. “He brings both lived experience and professional expertise to this work, and I am grateful that he has agreed to take on this leadership role.”
Supporting the college’s next phase
While the two roles focus on distinct areas of college life, together they represent a coordinated investment in CICS’s future—strengthening both the systems that support the college’s work and the community that sustains it.
“CICS’s next phase will require operational excellence while still maintaining a deep commitment to community,” Marzullo said. “With James and Jaime in these roles, we are in a strong position to help support the people, programs, and partnerships that will shape the future of the college.”
