Julian Lombardi

Assistant Vice President,
Academic Services and Technology Support

Julian Lombardi serves as Duke University’s assistant vice president of Academic Services and Technology Support, where he promotes the effective use of new and emerging information technologies in support of instruction and research. He oversees several management and operational teams focused on service evolution, quality improvement and innovation.

Julian is primarily known for his work in user interface design and in the design of computer systems that support collaboration between large numbers of users. He is one of six principal architects of the Croquet project, and is executive director of the Open Croquet Consortium. He is also a senior research scholar with Duke’s program in Information Science + Information Studies.

A former biology professor, Julian in the mid-1990s 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 multiuser online 3D environments. 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 managed a software research and development group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and oversaw strategic campus IT initiatives.