The College of Information Sciences and Technology is just that—a college—but from even before it officially opened its doors in 1999, it has also always been something more. From the beginning, IST Dean Andrea Tapia explains, the college was “the interdisciplinary incubator for the whole university.” That the college’s primary space on campus—the former IST Building, now known as Westgate Building—reaches across Atherton Street on the west side of the traditional University Park footprint is no accident. “We were the bridge between the social sciences and hard sciences,” Tapia says. “We were living in a physical metaphor.”

The college celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, and Tapia has been there for nearly all of it. She joined IST in 2002 and accepted a tenure-track position a year later. In addition to her teaching and research, she has also overseen the college’s graduate programs and served as associate dean for research. In May 2024, after 10 months leading the college in an interim role, she was named IST’s permanent dean. It wasn’t an opportunity she expected, but it’s one she knew she was ready for.

“My 22 years here are really helpful,” she says, “not only to know where we’ve gone, but where we might go with what we have.”

What IST has—both in the interdisciplinary focus that is part of its DNA and in its rigor in cutting-edge fields such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence—is a unique and increasingly vital teaching and research role at the university. In Tapia, the college also has a leader who matches its unconventional profile. The job of college dean at a major university is very much a public one, and it’s not a role Tapia could have embraced 10 or 15 years earlier the way she has now. Her confidence has much to do with the ink that covers her head, a bold, permanent (and, while the process lasted, particularly painful) response to living with alopecia that changed everything about how she interacts with the world.

It’s perhaps a stretch to imply that an academic unit can reflect the fearlessness of its leader. But in an era of dizzying technological change, shifting political ground, and emerging environmental threats, when cooperative innovation across seemingly unconnected disciplines is increasingly essential for solving unprecedented challenges, IST is a college singularly built to thrive. And in Tapia, it has a dean unafraid of audacious solutions.

“I think her tattoo is emblematic—she’s brave,” says Carleen Maitland, the college’s associate dean for research and graduate affairs and a longtime colleague and friend.

“She would be a great dean in a lot of situations and in a lot of places, but this was definitely the right place, and the right time.”

The college’s history is vital to understanding what IST is today. It was created around the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration both within the college itself—hence the unusual mix of computer scientists, business faculty, social scientists, and others, all thrown together with a problem to solve and leeway on how to solve it—and as a connecter of disciplines across the university; other deans call IST when facing a challenge that requires expertise beyond their own faculty. Administrators established it as a school, not a college, and Tapia says it functioned more as an institute: small and agile, well-funded and enthusiastically supported. Its first big project was the very-of-its-time challenge of converting a mass of paper medical records to an electronic format.

The idea, Tapia says, was that “you needed everyone to focus on the same problem, but everybody brought a different set of tools. And that’s the opposite of almost every college, where they all pretty much have the same set of tools but apply them to different things. This was flipping that.” She recalls going to conferences early in her career and seeing friends from grad school, who were stumped when she told them she was working at an “I-school.” Then she would describe it to them—academics with backgrounds in business, computer science, medicine, and law, their offices all in the same hallway, all leaning on each other’s disparate backgrounds and perspectives—“and they would say, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’”

For years, IST had no internal departments; that was intentional. The idea, Tapia says, is that “there are no silos. We have faculty areas to help us manage undergraduate curriculum, but we really don’t have any divisions. You can come in with any degree you want, and that doesn’t determine what you work on. It’s a different way of thinking, and it leads to a different kind of academics.”

One of Tapia’s early research priorities was disaster and emergency response, a complex problem for which IST’s approach is particularly well tailored. Her first National Science Foundation grant came as part of a collaboration with Maitland; they started in the college at the same time and have co-authored dozens of academic papers together since. Maitland’s earliest memories of her colleague hold up. “She’s always been fearless, willing to take risks,” Maitland says.

Tapia found her research niche in public informatics, studying how governments gather and respond to critical information. Early projects engaged her with the United Nations and an array of disaster response agencies whose lack of coordination severely hampered their ability to efficiently assist victims. Finding a survivor of some unnamed disaster, she explains, “a hundred different agencies would show up, and they would all have their own clipboards. And each agency would go up to that single survivor and say, ‘Tell me about the condition of your house. How many people in your family?” They would ask the same hundred questions a hundred times. They didn’t trust each other’s data. So, the project was, ‘Academics, please come help us solve this problem.’”

Tapia and her colleagues did just that, helping the UN and others build a network of trusted data that came to be shared by hundreds of agencies. Their findings, she says, came “just in the nick of time.” The 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti was an immediate, catastrophic test case, and one that coincided with the proliferation of cellphones; for the first time in history, virtually everyone in the impacted area was not only a victim of the disaster, but also an immediate and public source of information. People were texting family and friends about what they saw and experienced, and posting on multiple social media channels; it was, she says, “the threshold that changed everything about humanitarian information services.”

In the decade and a half since, much of Tapia’s work has focused on the collection and sorting of such data. (She illustrates this with a colorful example of how local authorities might coordinate a response to aliens landing on the roof of Hammond Building, which she can see from her office on the fourth floor of the Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub half a block from campus.) How, she asks, “can we take massive amounts of data, filter it for location, actionability, and legitimacy, and then map it in real time and get that to first responders who need it?”

Today, she says, nearly a dozen IST faculty have a hand in ongoing research in this area—experts in machine learning, mapping, and trustworthy data—in an approach that is emblematic of how the broader college functions. “We operate more like an institute than a traditional college—still, 25 years later,” Tapia says. “We are fast, agile, and nimble. We can pick up topics and put teams together fast. We just keep finding new and interesting problems, and it drives all these interesting people together.”

In her role as dean, Tapia is mostly concerned with finding the best ways to help those interesting people maximize their collaborative impact. She likely wouldn’t be in this position if not for an interesting problem of her own—a sudden, unexpected life change 20 years ago, and the difficult path that followed as she figured out how to present herself to a world that would never see her the same again.

When her son was born in 2004, Tapia lost all her hair.

She was a year into her new job as an assistant professor when she delivered her son. Within three months of his arrival, she had developed alopecia universalis, the most severe form of alopecia areata; an otherwise benign condition, it causes the loss of all hair on the body. “No eyelashes, no eyebrows,” she says. “It was just all gone.” She saw an array of doctors, all of whom echoed the same message: You definitely have alopecia universalis. It’s an autoimmune thing. There’s really no treatment. You’re now just a hairless person.

“It’s the most gentle disease you could ever imagine,” she says. “You’ll just never have a bad hair day.”

Initially, it wasn’t an easy thing to joke about. “It was a struggle—I didn’t know how to be in the world,” she says. For the first couple of years, she wore wigs to work and in social settings, but she found herself stumbling over the logic of when and why. Should she wear her wig to the gym? To go swimming? To go to the grocery store? “I didn’t know how to be professional, I didn’t know how to be nonprofessional,” she says. “I didn’t know how to be.”

It didn’t help that she found wigs to be “itchy, hot, and annoying,” and eventually she transitioned to wearing hats and scarves, which at least offered a chance to express herself through different colors and styles. But anytime she ventured out with anything less than full coverage—say, in just a baseball cap—she risked awkward conversations that left her dreading interactions with strangers. It might be at Wegmans, or the post office, or the bank, but almost inevitably, someone would approach her. “It was either, ‘How are you doing, tell me your cancer story,’ or ‘I’m a cancer survivor, too, let me tell you my story,’” Tapia says. “Either way, it was awful; they’ve just shared this deeply personal thing with you, and you don’t actually share their story.”

The experiences led Tapia to a frustrating realization: A bald man walking around in the world is, in most cases, just that—bald. But nearly every bald woman is assumed to be ill. “That was the reason to get a tattoo,” she says. “That way everybody wouldn’t question whether it was intentional. I would rather have them think I was weird than sick.”

Weird, for Tapia, is generally a term of endearment. Describing IST, she says, “the whole college is weird. We hire weird. We are weird. It’s really great.” Her own quirkiness is evident in the abandoned church in Burnham, Pa., about 40 miles from State College, that she bought and converted into the home she lived in before she moved closer to campus last year. She is, in other words, the sort of person unusually open to an idea like adorning her skull in permanent ink. The seed was planted a little over a decade ago, when she was in New Mexico to run a conference; while there, she caught up with an artist friend who lived nearby. The friend offered to give Tapia a henna crown; together they picked out a design, and then the friend went to work. It was painstakingly slow, but the result, Tapia says, was “strikingly beautiful. And it was gone within a couple of days. But I really liked it, and I needed to find a way to have a naked head in the world, for it to be feminine, and for people to be able to interact with me.”

Her mind made up, she started looking for a tattoo artist, a task made difficult by the fact that few were willing to work on a head: the thin skin, proximity to bone, and curvature make for a difficult working surface, and tattooists also know it’s arguably the most painful location for the client. Eventually Tapia got a recommendation for Brian Geckle, an artist then based in State College, and spoke with him to share design ideas and confirm that he met all her criteria: talented, confident, and, yes, brave. “Because it was a big, complicated, multiyear challenge,” she says. “And he was great.”

The work took about 20 hours, spaced out over two years, and Tapia confirms, “it was very, very painful.” Geckle insisted that she take nothing to numb the pain—no drugs or alcohol, not even ibuprofen. If you’re going to get a tattoo, he told her, you’re going to experience the getting of it. (Tapia’s brother is a neuroscientist, and after her first session, she told him that she’d had the weirdest experience: The pain was so intense that for a time she lost control of movement in her legs. “Yeah, that’s really interesting,” he replied, before explaining how the body can sometimes respond to intense pain by essentially dispersing sensations to other parts of the body.)

Tapia knew as soon as the work was done that it would be life-changing. “My interaction with the world is 100 percent different,” she says. “Night and day—really night and day.” Those closest to her saw it firsthand. Bailey Hoplight is working toward a Ph.D. in geosciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences; she is also Tapia’s niece, and the two have long been close. “I remember when she got the tattoo, seeing her for the first time, she was like, ‘I went to the grocery store, and I finally didn’t get the question about whether I have cancer. It was just, ‘Oh, your tattoo is cool!’ When I went with her to a football game last year, four or five people came up to ask her about it.”

Tapia has these interactions daily, and she says the experience has been universally positive. “It’s almost always curiosity,” she says.

Curiosity is good, but when the opportunity came to take over the dean’s chair, she wasn’t sure how being the subject of such curiosity might align with the full scope of being the public face of the college.  She laid it out to then-provost Justin Schwartz, making clear that she was happy with her life and work, and would take on this new and very public position only if she could live and work as her authentic self.

The answer is as obvious as the ink on her head.

“She’s always been this outgoing person around her family, but I feel like now, everyone else gets to see it too,” Hoplight says. “I remember that she used to try to blend in a little bit, but I think as she’s grown as a leader, that went away. Now she’s trying to stand out.”