Vice President For Communications

Dear Colleagues,

I write to share with you that Tysen Kendig, who has served as our vice president for communications since 2013, recently shared with me that he has accepted the position of vice president for communications and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He will leave UConn on July 1.

While we are sorry to lose such a valued longtime colleague, this is an incredible opportunity for Tysen and we wish him all the best in the next stage of his career.

In his decade-plus here at UConn, Tysen transformed our university's central communications operations by investing resources into new and emerging areas to meet UConn's growing needs as the communications field and best practices continued to evolve. He led successful efforts to strengthen, support, and protect our nationally and globally known brand and led multiple major branding initiatives, the most recent of which will launch this year. He worked closely with UConn Health's leaders beginning shortly after he arrived to conduct a comprehensive market study and led a dramatic overhaul of our clinical marketing efforts in Farmington, which played an important role in the substantial increase in the clinical revenue generated at UConn Health in recent years.

During his tenure he worked with UConn Athletics to manage its marketing communications and digital content team as it emerged from the pandemic and led the creation and launch of a first-of-its-kind streaming video network, UConn+. Just last year, the university also completed implementation of a new signage and wayfinding system - including the now-iconic UConn gateway sign on Route 195 - that Tysen helped spearhead several years earlier with support from University Planning, Design, and Construction.

He oversaw remarkable growth in terms of both content-generation and audience size in the social media, digital media, and multimedia fields, as well as through the generation of a high-volume of high-quality local, state, and national news coverage of our university, especially the exceptional research taking place on our campuses, faculty expertise, our contributions to Connecticut's economy, and student success. He has also structured University Communications to provide seamless support, resources, and guidance to units throughout UConn.

University Communications is a modern, sophisticated, effective, and nimble operation thanks to Tysen's leadership and savvy, as well as that of his excellent team, which he has skillfully cultivated over the last 11 years. We thank Tysen for his service and contributions to UConn.

Following Tysen's departure, Michael Kirk, UConn's associate vice president for university communications, will serve as interim vice president. As AVP, Mike currently oversees many of the teams within University Communications including News/Media Relations, Creative Strategy and Brand Management, Digital Content and Strategy, Social Media, Public Records, and the News team at UConn Health in Farmington, which jointly reports to him and Dr. Liang.

Many of you already know Mike well thanks to his nearly 20 years of experience at UConn, including in his previous roles as assistant vice president for university relations, deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to the president under three UConn presidents beginning with Susan Herbst, and as the university's chief spokesperson before that. Mike also served as acting vice president for communications for several months in 2021 while Tysen was temporarily embedded in Athletics. Prior to coming to UConn, Mike served as press secretary to a U.S. Congressman from Connecticut.

Our thanks to Mike for agreeing to step into the vice president's role on an interim basis.