Cathie Kozik

Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer,
PSAV® Presentation Services
BSEE '82

For her pioneering spirit, her leadership in the IT industry, and her service contributions to educational and health organizations

Cathie Kozik was a junior in high school when she went to her basement and built a binary computer from a chip, using a book that her dad brought home from Motorola.

"It was always about computers for me," she says. "The Apollo program attracted me to engineering and got me thinking about all the things necessary to get people to the moon."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in a close second to Purdue for this valedictorian from a large, Palatine, Illinois, high school. Kozik says Purdue and its Women in Engineering Program won out because it showed her how she could "add more immediate value to the world," and because the campus just felt like home when she visited.

Kozik recalls vividly the reality check that a 23 percent score on a test in Physics 152 proved to be, and the importance it had for her mindset as a Purdue student.

"Most students need that whooping upside the head — that reminder that if you're going to graduate from here you're going to earn it," she says. "It reminded me that if I really wanted to do this, I needed to work for it."

Now a proven leader who works hard to routinely deliver strong results with great teams, Kozik has succeeded for decades in building high-performing teams in IT and customer service, and in the telecommunications, public safety, and transportation industries.

Most recently, she has served as executive vice president and chief information officer for the Hub Group, a transportation company valued at more than $3 billion. She reinvigorated its IT team to deliver greater business value and high quality, on-time programs with strategic and secure use of cloud offerings and other technologies.

Before Hub Group, Kozik spent 10 years at Motorola, leading its overall IT operations, including key divisions such as its mobile devices business. She also oversaw Motorola's IT separation as it split into two publicly traded companies.

In both looking back and envisioning her future, Kozik talks of others, not herself, as she describes what's most important.

"Development of talent is really important to me," she says. "It’s all about the talent that you surround yourself with and how you inspire them. Identifying them, giving them opportunities to grow, challenging them and making sure that they don't take the easy way out as they continue to grow into the next generation of leaders. I have been blessed with wonderful opportunities and with professors like Professor Jamieson who challenged us to be our best."

"As I look over my career for the past 10 years, I have spent much of my time developing talent — women in particular. I truly believe that companies need diverse talent to be successful; otherwise, they're overlooking half of the marketplace. And that's as true in the industrial area as it is in the consumer marketplace."

Career Highlights

2015 Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, PSAV®Presentation Services
2014 Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Hub Group
2011–2013 Corporate Vice President, Global Services Operations, Motorola Solutions
2003–2011 Corporate Vice President of IT, Motorola Solutions
1992–2003 Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Tellabs Operations Inc.
1982–1992 District Manager, AT&T Information Systems
1987 MBA, University of Chicago
1982 BSEE, Purdue University