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At ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû¾«Æ·¸£Àû, the provost serves as the chief academic officer overseeing all academic operations, Career Development, IT, the Library and several other important administrative areas.

Mary Ellen Wells, JD, LLM: Senior Vice President & Provost

Professor Wells began her career as a tax attorney in Boston at Touche-Ross (now Deloitte & Touche). She subsequently practiced law at a firm that afforded her the ability to specialize in banking and tax law. While at the law firm of Bulkley, Richardson and Gelinas, Professor Wells drafted and negotiated multi-million dollar private activity bond documents and negotiated purchases and sales of multi-million dollar businesses in addition to other banking, corporate, estate, and real estate work.

After moving to Pennsylvania, Professor Wells became a full-time faculty member at ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû¾«Æ·¸£Àû, serving as Chair of the Business Department for seven years. She has been actively involved in program development and creating new course offerings throughout her career at Alvernia, including the development of our Ph.D. in Leadership and our certificate program in Fraud Examination. As a faculty leader, she has chaired the Rank and Tenure, Academic Standards, and Handbook Committees and has served as a member of the Honors and Awards, and Curriculum Committees. As president of the Faculty Council during 2020-2021, she was instrumental in proposing, garnering faculty support, and finalizing the four-college structure that includes the College of Business, Communication and Leadership.

Professor Wells combines her community connections with her dedication to Alvernia. From 2017 to 2019, she served as one of only two faculty appointed to the Board of Trustees' strategy task force charged with exploring new strategic initiatives for the University. She was the one Alvernia faculty member involved in presenting initial plans for Alvernia's anchor institution status to community leaders. From 2020 to 2022, she drew on that experience to lead the faculty and staff committee that worked with Alvernia's Senior Leadership Team members to finalize the strategic pillars of the Alvernia Advantage, adding objectives and measurable initiatives. Professor Wells also serves the community through her active participation as a Board member of both The Friends of the Reading Hospital and the Berks County Public Library. As a member of the Finance Committee of the Berks County Public Library, she is responsible for budgetary oversight.

Caroline Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.: Associate Provost

Dr. Caroline (Carrie) Fitzpatrick is Associate Provost and Professor of Communication & Digital Media at ÎçÒ¹¸£Àû¾«Æ·¸£Àû, where she has served in faculty and academic leadership roles for more than thirty years. Her work spans academic administration, online and hybrid education, curriculum innovation, faculty development, shared governance, research compliance, and strategic planning. Over the course of her career, she has helped lead major institutional initiatives including the development of Alvernia’s distance education infrastructure, the expansion of online programming, and the modernization of institutional research review systems.

Dr. Fitzpatrick’s teaching, scholarship, and leadership focus on the intersection of digital pedagogy, media literacy, artificial intelligence, and educational access. She has presented and published nationally and regionally on AI-integrated teaching and learning, intellectual property in higher education, open educational resources (OER), and digital media pedagogy. An advocate for affordability and equity in education, she has converted the majority of her courses to no-cost instructional materials and edited the open-access textbook Writing the Disciplines. Her current research explores institutional and course-level AI policy, authorship, and the evolving relationship between technology and higher education.

In addition to her work at Alvernia, Dr. Fitzpatrick has twenty years of non-profit board experience and worked more than ten years as a  qualitative research consultant. Across her teaching, scholarship, and administrative work, she is especially interested in mission-driven innovation, ethical AI integration, and creating student-centered learning environments that balance technological adaptability with human connection.