Julian Lombardi

Assistant Vice President

Julian Lombardi is an assistant vice president with Duke’s Office of Information Technology, where he oversees several management and operational teams focused on service evolution, quality improvement and IT innovation in support of Duke’s academic mission. Julian is primarily known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.

Julian is a senior research scholar with Duke’s program in Information Science + Information Studies and holds an adjunct appointment with Duke University's Department of Computer Science. He is one of six principal architects of the Croquet project and serves as Executive Director of the Croquet Consortium, a not-for-profit organization to promote the development and adoption open source software technologies for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online simulations..

A former tenured biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Julian combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems to begin developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving massively multi-user online 3D environments in the mid-1990s. He eventually founded ViOS Inc. in 1999, where he acted as the company’s first CEO then chief creative officer/software architect. From 2002-2005, he oversaw campus-wide strategic IT initiatives and managed a software research and development group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.