Businessman, civic leader, advocate, and former chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), Rick Myers has used his engineering and leadership skills to make a difference. Examples include leading the effort to create, and then chairing the election to pass a 20-year transportation plan and tax for southern Arizona, to working with the FDA and Pharmaceutical industry on modernizing approaches to drug development while COO of The Critical Path Institute, to being involved in tackling critical higher education challenges as part of ABOR. Rick has used his leadership in creative ways to drive positive outcomes.
Myers has also served on the Tucson Airport Authority, Southern Arizona United Way Board, chaired the United Way community campaign, and was chairman of the Southern Arizona Leadership Council, the CEO group in southern Arizona.
He served as chairman of the Science Foundation Arizona and Earn to Learn board of directors. SFAZ was an organization focused on seed grants for researchers at our state universities that were seen as important to the long-term economic development of our state. Earn to Learn has focused over the past decade on students and families from underserved populations, offering unique scholarships, requiring learning financial literacy and building proven savings habits.
Myers retired from the IBM Corporation in 2003 after 25 years. He was Vice President of Development, Storage Systems and was a member of the IBM CEO’s Senior Management Group. During his time in IBM Rick led the introduction of numerous new products which drove significant revenue as well as met important customer needs. Starting in 2010, he served an eight-year term on the Arizona Board of Regents, including two years as chairman. Myers co-chaired two presidential searches, co-chaired a task force on the future of the UA hospital that opened the opportunity for the partnership with Banner, helped to further implement the ABOR Enterprise plan and participated on the LCME preparation committee for the accreditation of the UA Medical School in Phoenix.
Rick was CEO of Tempronics, a venture funded technology company, and led it through two successful funding rounds and the development of the technology into a viable product.
With a colleague from Motorola, he created and for six years taught a highly rated graduate course on the management of technology in the combined Business, Science and Engineering Colleges at the University of Arizona.
Myers was named Tucson Man of the Year in 2013. He was born in Pittsburgh and is a first-generation college graduate with a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has a wife of 46 years, two daughters and five grandchildren.
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