By: Diane Stirling
(315) 443-8975
Whether leading a team managing credit card risk, driving tech innovation across a major organization, or establishing industry-academic collaborations, Jeff Saltz always gravitated towards jobs that offered opportunities to solve new and interesting problems.
That penchant now drives his transition to a teaching career. This fall, Saltz becomes a University professor of practice at Syracuse University, with a joint appointment at the School of Information Studies and the College of Engineering and Computer Science.
His move from industry to academia is something he considered years ago, when he earned his doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology with the idea of joining a university someday, he said. “Change is constant, but that’s what makes it interesting and keeps it interesting. It’s why I’m excited to be in academia. What we’ll be teaching in five years is different from what we’re teaching this year,” Dr. Saltz said. “We can guess what the future will be, but part of that is watching it evolve and taking advantage of technology advances as they are happening.”
Saltz is pleased to be joining the faculty he has collaborated with for several years. “In working with people in the iSchool for the last six years, I’m really excited to be part of the team; in part because I think all the faculty and all the students I interacted with have made it a very collegial environment.” He has worked with Syracuse University on behalf of JPMorgan Chase since 2008, and those efforts have resulted in several significant academic programs, including creating the Global Enterprise Technology minor, updating the Systems and information Science major, and establishing a technology center in Lyman Hall.
In focusing his attentions on students, teaching and research now, Saltz envisions a new degree of freedom to pursue innovation unencumbered by the priorities of business, he said. “I like working with students for a couple of reasons. I get great ideas from them because they come with fresh perspectives, and I like the dialogue that occurs when I share my knowledge and insight.”
He will be teaching an applied data science course this fall and will be conducting research in the areas of big data as far the exploration of visual analytics, and assessing entrepreneurial ecosystems that encourage improved startup success.
During his years in industry, Saltz started his career at Hewlett-Packard (Digital) as a programmer, then became a project leader and consulting engineer there, focusing on technology transfer at the company’s Paris Research Lab. He next became head of eBusiness technology and computational and emerging technology within the investment banking division at JPMorgan. He later moved to Goldman Sachs, where he was chief technology officer/Investor, serving as senior technologist within the venture capital group in financial services. Saltz later returned to JPMorgan Chase to lead technology research and academic initiatives within the office of the chief information officer.
Saltz obtained his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell University and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an adjunct professor at Widener University, and his writings have appeared in several professional journals. He also holds two patents, “System and Method for Characterizing and Selecting Technology Transition Options (DCA Framework)” and “A Process for Transforming Non-Geometric Data into a Volumetric Representation.”