JD Mills

I serve as Davidson College's Senior Director of Infrastructure & Operations. I lead five teams: the Support Center, Digital Campus, Infrastructure, AV Services, and Platform Engineering.

Davidson's primary purpose is to assist students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service. Our portfolio is one of the ways faculty, staff, and students get to pursue that purpose. Networks, endpoints, phones, classroom AV, data centers, and the collaboration tools everyone uses all day are the means and not the end, and that connection is why I've spent the majority of my career in higher education.

T&I describes this as purposeful technology and authentic partnership. Purposeful means we start with the work someone is trying to do rather than the product we could buy. Authentic means we stay close enough to our campus partners to know what that work actually looks like. When combined, the result should be less friction between technology, our constituents, and the reason they came here.

I came back to Davidson in 2015, after work in telecommunications, IT services, and clinical research. My own path wasn't a straight line. I started out as a student technician on the Davidson help desk, left college, and finished my degree years later while working full time. Later studies included participating in and graduating from the MOR Leadership Program. These experiences shaped me deeply. They’re why I pay more attention to where people are headed than where they started, and why the greatest professional satisfaction I’ve experienced has been watching our fellows and early career professionals grow within (or grow beyond) Davidson to do the next thing, whatever that means for them.

I stay hands-on, mostly with large language models and agentic AI, mesh networking, and getting systems to talk to each other that weren't built to. My current focuses are overhauling the college’s classroom technology and AV systems, and using AI to remove administrative minutiae so others can spend more of their time on things that directly serve the mission of the college.

In addition to my professional duties, I currently serve on the Enterprise Connect Advisory Board, where I provide guidance on topics such as agentic AI and unified communications.