Mark Morvant has been selected to serve as executive director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at University of Oklahoma. The Center for Teaching Excellence is designed to better assist faculty with implementing technology-driven course enhancements and advanced features of the electronic course management system. Morvant's strategies will free up OU faculty time to work in one-to-one interactions with students. His appointment to the position is effective Oct. 1, pending approval by the OU Board of Regents at its September meeting. Morvant joined the OU faculty in 2006 as an associate professor of chemistry; in 2011, he was named assistant chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Loretta Early, an Information Technology professional who has devoted the majority of her almost 30-year career to higher education, has been named University of Oklahoma Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. Early has served as OU's interim CIO since July 1, 2011. As Interim CIO, Early focused on uniting IT professionals at all three OU campuses through a Shared Services initiative designed to build a flexible platform for delivering a world-class technology experience through efficient sharing of technology services. Prior to assuming the position as interim CIO, Early served as associate vice president for Information Technology at OU for more than 10 years.

University of Oklahoma was awarded a $10,773,593 federal contract by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, for creating experimental serious games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis.