Wake Forest President appoints new vice president

Wake Forest University President Nathan O. Hatch has appointed Matthew Stephen Cullinan as vice president for administration at Wake Forest.

He will assume his new duties July 1, 2006.

Cullinan will oversee a range of areas, including human resources, information systems, facilities management and other administrative areas.

He will succeed John Anderson, Wake Forest’s vice president for finance and administration, who will retire next summer. In November, Hatch announced plans to divide Anderson’s position into two positions, vice president for administration and vice president for finance. A national search is underway for a vice president for finance.

Most recently, Cullinan has been executive assistant to the president at the University of Notre Dame. While in that position, he also served at various times as director of government relations, assistant secretary of the board of trustees, acting associate vice president for human resources and acting vice president for public affairs and communication.

“I am delighted to welcome Matt Cullinan to Wake Forest and I look forward to working with him,” said Hatch, who became Wake Forest’s president in July after serving as provost at the University of Notre Dame. “I came to deeply admire and respect Matt when we were colleagues at Notre Dame. He is a gifted administrator with a depth of administrative experience in several key areas that I believe will serve Wake Forest well. He also understands higher education from the inside out and will bring those insights to his work here.”

Cullinan earned a doctorate in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he also earned a bachelor’s degree. He received a master’s degree in public policy from Duke University.

Cullinan served as assistant to the president of Notre Dame from 1992-1998. From 1998-2000 he was Notre Dame’s assistant provost for academic outreach. He created Notre Dame’s “summer experience” pre-college program for high school students and supervised the operation of the Center for Continuing Studies and the McKenna Hall Conference Center.

Cullinan spent a year as a senior program officer for education policy at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, where his responsibilities included the development of a new strategy for the trust’s involvement in arts and education.

He has served on the boards of several non-profit organizations including the South Bend Center for the Homeless, the Northern Indiana Center for History, the United Way of St. Joseph County and the St. Joseph County Coalition Against Drugs.

Categories: University Announcement