Tom Martin named executive director of Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology

For Tom Martin, the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) at Virginia Tech has long mirrored many of his own academic and research interests.

“About 20 years ago, before ICAT existed, I was working on a number of different cross-college courses and design experiences for students,” Martin said. “This was before the university was making a push to do interdisciplinary activities and a lot of the things we had to do were just completely under the radar, like teaching several independent studies that happen to meet in the same room at the same time. When ICAT came along in 2011, suddenly, this was the type of work the university was encouraging. So I just naturally gravitated to ICAT.”

On May 10, Martin will officially take the reins of the institute as its new executive director. He’s been serving as interim co-executive director alongside Lisa McNair, deputy executive director at the institute, since August 2025 when the pair stepped in for the former executive director, Ben Knapp.

“We have a great team at ICAT and great faculty working with us, and I’m very excited about the possibilities,” Martin said.

As executive director, Martin will report to Dan Sui, senior vice president for research and innovation.

“Tom has an extraordinary track record of decades of research, teaching, and interdisciplinary work at Virginia Tech and within ICAT,” said Sui, also the university’s chief research and innovation officer. “His passion and vision for pushing boundaries at the intersection of arts and technology are essential for advancing ICAT’s mission and the university’s research enterprise.”

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2001, Martin is also a professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with courtesy appointments in the School of Architecture, the School of Design, and the Departments of Engineering Education and Computer Science. He has also served as the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine’s associate dean for strategic research advancement. Before returning to ICAT last year, Martin was on a temporary assignment as a program director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Smart Health and Human-Centered Computing programs.

During his time at the university, Martin’s role with ICAT evolved from senior fellow to associate director to deputy director. Prior to starting his next role as executive director, Martin shared his thoughts on the institute, his journey, and his vision for the institute's future.

“I want ICAT to be a place that everybody wants to work with to overcome negative side effects of the traditional silos of higher education,” Martin said.

What drives your passion for working across the traditional boundaries of academia?

I went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University, where my degree was in electrical and computer engineering, but I didn't actually sit in that department. I sat in an interdisciplinary design research center and shared an office with a couple of industrial designers. We had an architect down the hallway, mechanical engineers, and computer scientists, and having folks from several departments working together was just the way things worked. I found I really benefited from having all those perspectives together and so, when I came to Virginia Tech, I wanted to give my students those same sorts of experiences.

What excites you most about ICAT in this moment? 

ICAT has a really great team that has worked together for years. Ben did a great job putting together the team, and coming up with the early directions. I think ICAT has a very firm foundation at the intersection of arts and technology, and thinking about how to leverage that foundation to help the university meet its goals, specifically for Global Distinction and Virginia Tech Advantage, is very exciting.

What goals do you have for your first year at ICAT?

ICAT is going in a great direction. So we don’t need a major course correction, but probably could benefit from sharpening our focus. Looking at the areas where we're strongest and figuring out how to leverage those to explore some new opportunities. One of the first things I want to do is go talk to people both inside ICAT, as well as across the university, to hear what others see as our strengths and our challenges. I have a pretty good handle on many things here, but I want to add any fresh perspectives that I can.

What did you learn from your time with National Science Foundation that you hope to apply in this new role?

Being away for a couple years gave me an insider-outsider perspective. It let me see some ways that other universities are doing things differently than we’re doing and thinking about things in a different way that I think would be useful. For example, at the NSF, one of my responsibilities was digital fabrication and design tools for arts, crafts, and making, which fits really well with some of the work that faculty working with ICAT are already doing. So, looking at all the great work happening at ICAT at this intersection of the arts, design, science, engineering, and technology, there are possibilities to shape those narratives in ways that reach more people outside of the immediate university community.

What do you most want people to know about ICAT?

Outside of the university, I want people to know ICAT sits outside all the colleges and so if a person needs perspectives that span across the university, ICAT can help them find faculty with those perspectives and bring them together as a team. This is one of the things I did as deputy director, when companies would have an early-stage project idea and needed a variety of perspectives to explore the idea.

For example, the Smart Health Care Hub destination area that we have now, which is led by Sarah Parker out of the school of medicine, that grew out of a project with Steelcase where they came to us and said, "Hey, we'd like to explore future medical workspaces because doctors are becoming more data workers than they are health care workers." So I put together a team that had Sarah on it along with faculty from architecture, computer science, and industrial design and some of their students, and we worked with the folks from Steelcase for several months exploring ideas for future medical workspaces. And that’s just one example.

Internally, I want people to know that we're really trying to explore opportunities that don't fit neatly inside one of the colleges, to grow the boundaries of things that Virginia Tech is working on, and help incubate them. One way that I like to think of it is that ICAT is to Virginia Tech what an advanced development group is to a big company. Big companies often have an advanced development group, where the group is trying out new ideas, de-risking them, and seeing if they work. And then for the ideas that will work, they hand it over to a business development group, who scales it up. So you can think of ICAT and the other investment institutes as advanced development, as incubators, where we try out new ideas for the university, de-risk them, see what works, and the ones that work get handed off and scaled up in one of the colleges or the other units.

What would you most like for people to know about you?

If you’re a faculty member with a research idea that doesn't really fit into your home department, come talk to me. If you have an idea for a project and you're looking for a partner across campus, come talk to me and we'll help do some match making to find somebody to make your work better. I really would like for ICAT to be seen as a place where people come together to be able to explore opportunities that they can't explore on their own.