Keith Pierce joins Outreach and International Affairs as communications coordinator
Keith Pierce is the new communications coordinator for Virginia Tech’s Outreach and International Affairs. Pierce comes to Virginia Tech with more than 20 years of public relations and communications experience, including positions within military, corporate, and nonprofit organizations.
Pierce will contribute stories to the monthly publication Outbursts as well as the division’s video news channel. A primary focus will be the Roanoke-based Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement. The center offers executive training to individuals and groups nationwide in areas such as environmental management and school administration.
Outreach and International Affairs encompasses such varied enterprises as the Office of Economic Development and the Office of International Research, Education, and Development. The division shares the best of Virginia Tech with communities around the world, transforming lives with engagement work that is the heart of Virginia Tech's land-grant mission.
Before joining Virginia Tech, Pierce led strategic communications efforts at the school district and state level in Pennsylvania and New York. He worked as a strategic communications consultant to several corporate and nonprofit clients including superintendents, schools boards, corporate CEOs, and healthcare leaders. Pierce also previously served as press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, where he played a key role in communicating the governor's unprecedented investment in education, directed communications for reform in the School District of Lancaster, and led communications efforts for Philadelphia’s Children Achieving Challenge, a $200 million school reform agenda under the Annenberg Foundation’s nationwide improvement effort.
Pierce has also served as a public affairs officer in both the active U.S. Army and National Guard.
He holds a degree in communications from LaSalle University in Philadelphia and completed additional training at the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. He is accredited in public relations by the Public Relations Society of America.
Pierce replaces Rich Mathieson, who has been assigned full-time to the Language and Culture Institute.
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
