IST Advisory Board

Information Sciences and Technology (IST) Program Advisory Board
Members’ Profiles

Amy Cyprych           

A Penn State New Kensington graduate, Cyprych is currently Director of Risk Revenue at Highmark, and leads a team of program and project managers and business and data analysts, who support risk adjustment for Medicare Advantage and Affordable Care Act. Her responsibilities include facilitating the department’s strategic and tactical planning, leading business process modeling and redesign activities, developing business requirements and test plans, and managing the operational data submission processes.

Cyprych, who earned a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and technology from the Campus in 2003, remains connected to her alma mater. She delivered the commencement address to fall 2015 graduates and frequently returns to campus as guest speaker in IST classes where she enjoys interacting with the students and sharing her experiences in the corporate world. In addition, Cyprych participates as an employer partner of the GREAT (Growing Regional Excellence through Experience, Academics, and Training) program for promising students in engineering and technology fields. She has also been appointed recently to the Penn State New Kensington Advisory Board.

The Lower Burrell resident lives with her husband, Jim, and their two pugs, Peyton and Bailey.

Brian Kalmar

Brian, a Penn State New Kensington Alumnus is a Principal Software Architect Giant Eagle, Inc. He has worked at Giant Eagle for the past 22 years. In his current role as Principal Software Architect, Brian is responsible for distributed software designs, defining enterprise integration patterns, vendor evaluations, mentoring developers, training developers and assisting with support issues. He specializes in Microsoft technologies, although has exposure to many other technologies at Giant Eagle.

Brian has previously worked with Dr. Hal Smith, Associate Professor at Penn State New Kensington on many capstone projects over the years. He is actively working with Jim Shields the Career Services Coordinator at Penn State New Kensington on the GREAT program. The GREAT Program is a New Kensington Campus initiative which gives local company partners the opportunity to be directly involved with developing promising and talented technology and engineering students. Brian’s son Javan is a member of the GREAT program.

Brian graduated with a Bachelors degree in Management Information Systems in 1990 at the Penn State Behrend Campus, and with an Associates degree in Computer Science in 1987 at the Penn State New Kensington Campus.

Rich Gilbert

Rich, a native of Oakmont, PA, is a Penn State New Kensington Alumnus. He is presently a Principal Telecommunications Engineer in the Networks and Cyber Security department for Bombardier Transportation, Rail Control Solutions (RCS) Division, located in West Mifflin area of Pittsburgh.  Bombardier, a corporation of approximately 70,000 employees worldwide has two industries, rail and air; Rich works on the rail side of the business.In his current position, Rich serves as the Head Telecommunications Design Engineer for RCS’s Network and Cyber Security Department.  His responsibilities include designing, overseeing, and implementing backbone (wired) and RF (wireless) communications systems for the CITYFLO signaling systems, deployed in Automatic Train Control Driverless Systems. 

Rich has previously served in Technical Project Management roles for Telecommunications System Deployments worldwide, and as the Manager of Sales and Business Development for North America.  He works to cultivate relationships with transit authorities and third party consults for future partnerships and participates in building networks within organizations.  He has had the opportunity to travel the world.  Rich shared with me that he is happy to be working mostly in the continental United States now.  He has finished his New York contract.  Through October and November 2016, he was working in Chicago, San Francisco, and London. 

Rich is an active APTA and is a regular presenter at international conferences. He started with Bombardier as a senior design engineer immediately following the completion of his graduate work in 2005.  He earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Sciences Technology from Penn State in only three years in 2003. His Master of Science in Information Science was obtained from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. 

Amy Peterson

Ms. Peterson is the Vice President of IQ Inc., a custom software engineering and consulting company located in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. She serves as a member of the senior management team, responsible for defining strategic direction and instituting systems and processes that provide effective management to obtain the company’s strategic direction and goals. Her focus is on driving service excellence, customer and employee satisfaction, organizational effectiveness, and overall continuous improvement.

Amy received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Clarion University in 1988 and has been an active leader in the Pittsburgh software development community for the last 28 years. She has worked for large and small businesses in the fields of software development, project management, engineering management, business development, and process improvement, and has held various senior management positions.  Her software experience resides over all aspects and types of software engineering including embedded systems, PC systems, web applications, and mobile applications.

Amy has focused much of her career on implementing software engineering best practices and processes in highly regulated industries, developing leaders within her organizations, growing and developing great teams, and bettering our technical communities by supporting co-op and internship programs from various educational institutions.

Most recently, Amy co-founded and coordinates the Pittsburgh Technology Leaders Group (PTLG).  The group’s mission is to provide opportunities for local technical leaders to grow in knowledge and skills though collaboration, education, and encouragement. She is also a member of the Pittsburgh Agile Executive Forum, the Pittsburgh chapter of Women in Bio, the AdvaMed Women’s Executive Network, and the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

Angela M. Foglia

Having graduated from the University of Pittsburgh Information Sciences program with both Bachelor and Master’s degrees, Angela has been in the IT industry for more than 25 years with 21 of them with Alcoa (who recently became Arconic).  Within those twenty-one years, she was in the infrastructure environment managing technical teams responsible for operating system administration, storage area network and backups, and architecture.  In that time frame, Angela’s teams facilitated in the establishment of the North America Data Center by implementing the new storage area network solution at the time and enabling servers to connect to the SAN, regardless of operating system.  An equal amount of time was spent managing teams in the application area where she ran the EBS (ERP) project management team and implemented new business-to-business technologies in the Integration Services department. 

Being the IT Manager for the Arconic Technology Center since February of 2014, her role and overall responsibilities continue to pertain to the management and support of Information Technology (IT) resources – equipment and human.  The scope of this team is to implement new IT solutions that will facilitate in a variety of functional areas with the objective of improving their productivity through automated IT solutions and/or streamlined processes.  IT is comprised of the network, equipment (servers, PCs, and disks), and applications (custom or vendor) where her team codes these solutions or configures vendor-created solutions.  Working collaboratively with the Corporate IS teams and other business unit IT areas, they provide IT expertise to establish a manageable, secure, productive environment.  Angela also serves as the Leader for the Arconic Women’s Network, as well as being actively engaged in the Chatham Women’s Entrepreneurship program.

Brian Orlic

Brian a Penn State graduate with Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting, is currently an Executive Manager and Controller at McCutcheon Enterprises, Inc. since 2009. In this critical role, he manages all facets of corporate finance, accounting, and information technology for this provider of environmental services that include hauling, transportation, and remediation. Between 2006 and 2009, Brian served various roles at Paradigm Aerospace Corporation, Mt. Pleasant, PA, first as Controller and progressing to Vice President of Finance, and becoming a Member of the Board of Directors. With Entrepreneurial startup background, he was the owner of American Water Tech, Greensburg, PA between 2000 to 2006. He also served in difficult capacity including project and accounting consultant at Arthur Andersen LLP, Pittsburgh, PA, and Dura-Bond Industries Inc., Export, PA respectively between 1990 and 1999.

Brian has strong IT expertise and keenly interested in digitation, business processes, integration and data/information exchange across heterogeneous software applications. He welcomes the opportunity to mentor and support students who are looking for insight and exposure in the IST field as it relates to our industry.

Keith Kautzman

An accomplished leader of IT, Keith is currently VP – Sr Application Service Manager / Systems Director at PNC Inc. In this role, he provides strategic leadership for the operational system support of over 70 applications inclusive of Deposit, Debit Card, Fraud, Customer Information Systems, Information Management, Marketing and Communications. Between 1998 and 2015, he held several other senior roles at PNC Inc. including Technology Manager/Application Systems Manager, Technical Project Lead and Lead Software Engineer.

Keith obtained a Bachelors of Science (BS) degree in Information Systems from University of Pittsburgh in 1996. He previously served as a teaching assistant at university of Pittsburgh Computer learning Center, and is a certified Project Management Professional. Keith has expertise in application development, SDLC as well as leadership of people and projects.