Ron Payne Headshot

Ron Payne

Assistant Director for Program Operations

With over 35 years of experience in project and program management, Ron brings his expertise in implementing creative strategies to efficiently manage and scale large programs. He spent 23 years at Motorola in the Chicago area working on their telecommunications systems where he was responsible for new product implementation and managing a cross-functional team. Ron joined the university to work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for seven years, where he successfully managed large-scale projects and also started the Project Coordination Office which doubled in size over his last three years there. Most recently, Ron was the Managing Director for the Molecule Maker Lab Institute at the Institute for Genomic Biology.

Ron holds a Professional Science Masters in Technical Systems from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master’s Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University.