Jan Mahar Sturdevant is a senior lecturer emerita in the College of IST.
Prior to her academic work, she worked thirty years for IBM in their laboratory, manufacturing, statistical modeling research, and 3-D graphic corporate office. As an SAP Educational Corporate Consultant, she had developed and deployed SAP education in Logistics to IBM’s Production Procurement Division worldwide. Mahar had also consulted for IBM in the area of project management, designing and educating their management in this area. One of her last assignments with IBM was consulting for the e-business applications, such as web-requisitioning for catalog buying to feed SAP, e-Business training, and optimizing contractors’ bids and contracts.
Previously, as the Assistant Director of Business and Career Solutions, Mahar was responsible for providing strategic leadership and business planning, as well as representing IST during client visits. She had re-engineered many processes to improve student placement resulting in IST having one of the highest placement rates at the University. Currently, she continued to develop partnerships with business, government, and other related educational institutions. These partnerships involved brokering faculty expertise and developing sponsored student internships which optimized career placements with corporations.
Mahar served on the Advisory Board for the I-Tech 99 Corridor Alliance, encouraging corporations to move into this location. She had been awarded over $330,000 in grants from Ben Franklin, Team PA, and various chambers to develop PA FutureConnect, which matched IST students with tech companies in local research parks throughout Pennsylvania. Currently, she was the project manager for Department of Defense DTRA multi-million-dollar projects: Student Research Associate Program and the Post Ph.D. Program which created research partnerships among various universities through the nation.
