DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Why Every Future Doctor Needs an Engineering Degree (ft. Lev Gonick)

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

Dr. Lev Gonick is the Enterprise Chief Information Officer at Arizona State University, where he leads technology infrastructure, AI innovation, and smart city architecture for the nation's largest public university. An academic and technology pioneer for more than three decades, Lev has been a sitting CIO for 25 years, with prior leadership at Case Western Reserve University and co-founding regional digital equity initiatives like DigitalC. In this bonus episode of DGTL Voices, Lev tells Ed about growing up in an academic family, the pivotal 1993 university sabbatical that shifted his career into online learning, and why a university's success should be measured by who it includes rather than who it excludes. He also shares insight into ASU’s radical new medical school program where every future doctor also graduates with an engineering degree to navigate the upcoming AI economy. Plus: the unique strategy he uses to stay ahead of tech trends by employing 350 student "coaches," why building true human relationships matters more than titles, and how getting lost in the kitchen as an amateur chef keeps him grounded. https://marxadvisory.com

Healthcare providers are going to need to know how to prompt AI. They're going to need to know how all that works because that's the future of medicine. That is a mark of great leadership. When everyone else is figuring out how to just survive, you're figuring out actually how to pivot to what comes next. We are the largest public university in the country with almost 194,000 students. We measure our success by how they succeed, not how the institution, quote, unquote, succeeds by being the elite.

All of us as CIOs need to find mission, you know, that aligns to our personal values. Our networks, you know, as I say, you know, our net worth is really our network. It's the network of humans. People we try to hopefully support and launch on their careers going forward. Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move health care forward. Now your host, Ed Marks. Hey, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. So excited about this episode because I have a longtime friend Lev Ghanik joining us. Lev, welcome to Digital

Voices. And great to see you and thanks for having me on your program. So Lev, yeah, I was trying to think back how long we've known each other. So at the early 2000s, right? When did you get to Cleveland? 25 years ago. So we're in our quarter century of knowing each other here, Ed. Yeah, and we look just the same, which is the most handsome man that it's ever lived in our wife's just a refugee. I know I've told you this before, but I just want my entire audience to know. I became who I was as a CIO in large part to you. I owe a lot, large to you. So I was this, I was this man, went behind the ears.

No one mentored me because of how I became a CIO. And I just kind of fell into the position. And then you were like, you know, you had been a CIO for a while, I think someplace else, if not. California. Yeah, I've been in California. And so I was just watching you and you were doing these cool things and I just stole from you. I was like, oh, that's cool. I guess you should like partner with vendors as one silly example.

You know, because a lot of people, right, CIOs oftentimes it's adversarial. But you were like partnering and doing things and joint. And so I was just taking notes in how you worked with your customers, how you worked with executives. I was like, I just became a sponge. And so you were, you were informally mentoring me. And so I'm always so thankful. And so I want to share you with my audience. Like, this is the CIO who's still super active.

And also, you're still leading the way today, Lev. I still copy from you. So it's not like it just happened 25 years ago. I watch you. And what you're doing in Arizona and higher education. You're just amazing person and leader. So anyways, I just want to say thank you. Thanks, Ed.

Very gratify as you may not know, but you were one of my CIO heroes, and I don't have that many. And so glad to know that somewhere along the way I managed to turn a light bulb on for you. Yeah, and we'll have all your contact information in show notes, and you also produce a lot of content and just a person full of wisdom, so people should definitely follow you. And so that's sort of how we first met, like way back when. But the most important question that we have, Lev, is what are the songs on your playlist?

Like, what kind of music do you like to listen to? I've always been a jazz guy, and so I'm, I move between sort of the classics. You know, I'm a Thelonious monk kind of crazy guy, and I love Miles. I love that whole sort of early 50, 60s genre, that period of Miles and Thelonius and many others, 50s, 60s. And, you know, I love contemporary female jazz vocalists. I love Kansas Springs.

I was just listening to her playlist this morning. She's out of Kansas City. and she's just one of my favorite female artists. It's a great jazz scene here in Phoenix, so I get to see a lot of great talent. Oh, that's awesome. Next time I'm there, because I don't know if you know or not,

but my dad lives in Scottsdale. He moved there in the last couple years. No excuses, Ed. I'll take you out on the town. Yeah, I need, and I love female vocal jazz. So, like, I have big Diana Kral fan, so I need to look up this person from Kansas City now. Yes, so Candice,

with a K. And she used to say when she was young, not but to see, which everyone would kind of guess to. She's Candace Springs. Yeah, I'm going to look her up. That's why I love asking that question, because it gives me, like, new ideas for music as well. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you sort of live by that guide who you are? Honestly, add lead by example. I mean, that's sort of been my

mantra, trying my best to be ready to be player coach. You know, that's kind of another really important piece of it. very much to build community, both at work and more broadly. That's another big part of sort of of my DNA and sort of my, you know, my center, my center and North Star. Yeah. So, Lev, now we know a little bit about your background. You know, we talk a little bit about just high level on Cleveland and where we met a little bit about your music and your mantra. But tell us more, like, who are you? Like, who is Levgonic? What's your life story? You know, not to go back to the

beginning of time, but I'd sort of say, you know, I grew up in an academic. family. And for me, you know, it was all, I was always, and I still am, always amazed at this incredible institution that humans have created called universities. It's got to be the most marvelous sort of, you know, creation in terms of the opportunities to, to set people off on a journey, to discover, discover who they are, help them change the world in whatever way they want to change the world, to open doors. I mean, just that journey of discovery for me has always been amazing. So I grew up in that environment. And for me, you know, it was kind of a natural thing to once I finally decided to go to college, which I was a couple of years late because they did

grow up in an academic family. And I thought initially, like, the world's not big enough for two gonics or three gonics in academic life. But, you know, after I decided to get into academic life, I was a faculty member. You know, I did a lot of work. My PhD is actually on the introduction of new technologies into traditional mining communities. I did field work in Africa, field work in India, and field work back in Canada, which is my home country.

After a while, you know, one of those great luxuries of being an academic and you know it because at least in part you were in academic medicine for a while, you know, you get these amazing things called sabbaticals. Like what a brilliant human creation. and unfortunately only academics, at least as best as I know. I guess I think in corporate IT you get these short sabbaticals. But anyway, I had a sabbatical in 1993, Ed. And I had and have a special needs daughter.

And so we were trying at the time to figure out how best to get some intervention for my daughter, who's on the autism spectrum. And it turns out that in sabbatical land, to try to find like an institution that might have you, and you bring a chunk of your salary with you and some ideas on what you might do. Anyway, I found myself in the fall of 1993 when my daughter was five years old at Arizona State University.

The fall of 1993, Ed, like you and I remember this, hopefully some of your viewers and listeners will as well. That's when the commercial internet browser was born in the fall of 1993. So here I was on sabbatical. Time on my hands, kind of a nerd, but now, you know, I was doing international affairs, I mean, and technology. I mean, that was kind of my thing. And I started teaching online and, like, nobody had actually really taught online with a browser. I'd been teaching online with things before browsers.

These were tools like Archie was one of the tools. These were all before we actually had hypertext markup language that was available. And anyway, when the browser became available, I was teaching online and I kind of thought, wow, this is so cool. Why would I ever want to go back to the traditional classroom? And I started consulting to schools all over the world. We were interested in this, you know, Internet thing that had just shown up. And I was teaching online in a global seminar, actually, online. And that changed my life.

And I decided to stay the course with trying to do. innovation and impacting students' lives around the world, leveraging technology as my space, and helped to pioneer some of that work in that earlier era. And then, you know, then progressed through the ranks, you know, and have really been on this CIO journey, which I know is the core of your listenership and viewership, you know, for the better part now of 25 years as a sitting seat.

CIO that you and I have known and before that about 10 years in academic technology, which is kind of a specialty inside the higher education space. Yeah, no, that's a great synopsis of your career in some of the sort of the pivotal moments that help shape who you are. What are one or two high points along the way? And then I want to talk about ASU and higher education. Well, I mean, to be honest, like you don't get that many chances to be a pioneer in one's professional life. And so having serendipitously found myself with the time and a little bit of the story that I shared, that was a remarkable moment for me and realizing just what kind of

impact one could have leveraging technology. And I began to sort of talk about, write about, and then try to instantiate in my own, you know, classroom delivery, that again, online classroom delivery, the art of the possible. And so I've done, you know, I've had a lot of opportunities. opportunities to innovate, you know, before there was streaming online. I was trying to do streaming online. Before there was, you know, serious work with multimedia online. I was doing multimedia online. So I've always been trying to unlock curiosity in students.

And I guess the only other thing I'd share with you, Ed, is I've always been committed. And this goes all the way back to my doctoral research on how technology impacts. community. And some of the work that you and I did together in Cleveland, you know, we created this project about ways in which our anchor institutions, whether they were hospitals or whether they were universities, could actually be a better service to the communities around them. And, you know, together we created this project that started off as one Cleveland and then became one community and later still became Digital C. In fact, to this day, well after you and I have left Cleveland, remarkably, Digital C is alive and well, in fact, under fantastic leadership of a young man called Josh Edmonds,

providing internet connectivity to provide schools, education and training opportunities, health and wellness opportunities for the inner city of Cleveland. Today, you know, the better part of 8,000 Clevelanders households actually having that internet connectivity. So that's always been really important to me. And I continue to do that to do my best here in Phoenix and in the broader metro area to, you know, advance ways in which we can use technology to advance the priorities of the communities around us. Yeah, no, I love that mission. You've always been a missional type of leader. So that's super.

And last thing on the career, because I know a lot of people always have questions about this as well, you're able to carve out a little bit of time to serve on some advisory boards or boards. What would be your record? Like, tell us the positive attributes of doing that. Like, why should someone serve on some other boards? To be honest with you, Ed, it's incredibly selfish. I mean, I have an insatiable appetite for learning. And, you know, even though I've been in this space for as long as I have,

in fact, maybe because I have, I know a lot of things that I don't know are outside of the things that I'm very comfortable and familiar with. So serving as an advisor, having an opportunity to hear, especially entrepreneurs who are interested in the educational technology space, share their passions, their commitments, their visions, gives me insight. When I started this in Cleveland, I used to have a personal coach who was a first year student, a freshman. And I love this idea of staying like day one oriented. And that's, you know, again, I serve as advisor. I'm on a number of boards, mostly to learn, hopefully to share a little bit of my journey, my experience, some insights on technology choices. Those are the kinds of things that are really special.

Yeah, I just smiling because, you know, when you give some of those examples, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, that's where I learned that. I was copying you this whole time. I was serious. Like, some of it was a little bit old. some of it was definitely highly intentional, but a lot of it was just subliminal. I just think watching you operate. So yeah, let's pivot now to ASU,

but before we do one last thing just for our audience, is that Lab was with Case Western Reserve University, one of the highest rated universities of our country that have medical school engineering, not too much on the sports side. And it was affiliated, it is affiliated with university hospitals where I became the CIO, and that was the academic medical center.

the two of us had a chance to work together, a lot of things. And so it was so much fun. All right. So now we're pivot. Now we know why, or one of the reasons you went back to ASU, because you had this experience there previously. So yeah, tell us about ASU and what drew you there and what makes you stay. Well, it turns out, even in the short couple of minutes that we spent, you know,

you know this well, but hopefully now your viewers and listeners will do. I am driven by mission. it always matters to me. In fact, it's a first principle. And ASU is a mission-driven institution committed in a radical way to democratic access to education and to learning outcomes. In a way that, you know, I'm a bit of a student of the history of universities, in a way that sort of is grounded in the initial sort of American ideal of creating public. universities for people to be able to participate in, learn, discover, and unlock their own passions

and their own commitments and hopefully the right skills to achieve them along the way. And so, you know, ASU is mission driven. It has a remarkable CEO. And again, again, you know this because we've talked about this a lot over the years. working with and for a CEO who gets technology is a gift for a CIO in our careers. I know this, you know this. Sometimes you're bringing the whole enterprise along with you, dragging, sometimes kicking and screaming. This is a very different situation.

Our CEO, President Michael Crow, is a remarkable leader in our space, a unicorn in many ways. very special. And he and I have known each other for well over 25 years. And I followed him when he was in Columbia. He's been now 23 years at Arizona State University. And when the opportunity knocked, as I was looking to pivot new opportunities, and he and he and his team reached out, it was a great opportunity for me to join Michael. And I've been doing this work here for nine years. You know, we measure. you know, our success as an institution and we are the largest public university, you know, in the country with almost 194,000 students, Ed. We measure our success by who we include, not who we exclude. And we measure our success by how they succeed, not how the institution, quote, unquote, succeeds by being the elite in that kind of sort of way in which public higher education in our country has evolved. And again, there's room for

all those great, great public universities in the Midwest, of which, of course, you know, I'm a graduate of Ohio State, and, you know, I'm still going to be cheering for the Buckeyes, you know, this year for repeat. But, you know, they've evolved. And I love the mission of ASU as committed to that public purpose. And I think that all of us as CIOs need to find mission, you know, that aligns to our personal values. Yeah. And, you know, I've landed good here at ASU that way. Oh, that's Awesome. I didn't realize it was the largest institution, higher ed institution, 194,000 students. That's, that's amazing. Right. And we were first, we were among the first to dive in during the 2008, 2009 implosion of the economy into online learning. So one of the other things just to sort of share it when I said that when you get a CEO who gets it, 2008, 2008, 2009, at least in my industry, folks were like heads under the table just hoping this thing would, you know, kind of

the way he would somehow move over us. But President Crow, along with, you know, a fantastic leader whose name is Phil Regier, created ASU online at the very moment that there was this incredible, you know, disruption in the economy. And again, as technology people, we know that is a mark of great leadership when you're able to pivot at that exact moment, when everyone else is figuring out how to just survive, you're figuring out actually how to pivot to what comes next. And again, Michael Crow and Phil Regier are fabulous visionaries and more importantly in many ways,

visionaries who know how to actually make it happen. Yeah, I love that. And I can definitely see it. I think my only claim to fame, Levin, and I hope it's ASU, otherwise I'll have to delete this whole segment. But I remember doing Iron Man in Tempe. Isn't ASU part of the campus along the river there? It is.

It is indeed. keep this in your podcast here. Ed. Yes, Iron Man and I know that you've been an inspiration to many, many of us, not only because of your Iron Man, because of the circumstances and your Iron Man work. So, you know, you are a remarkable human and inspiration to us. And yes, you

run literally right across the campus. Now, the Tempe campus is one of our campuses, but the Metro Phoenix area is the fifth largest metro area in the entire country. And as a result, you would have had to have traveled more than 50 miles from the West Valley campus, which is near Glendale, which is, you know, where our professional football team plays. This year not so good. Next year, like we Brown fans say, next year is our year here as well.

All the way out to the east side, which is actually on the redevelopment of a military base, which we call our polytechnic campus out in Mesa. And we have a downtown campus as well. So that is sort of the body of the on-campus community here. And in that down campus, we actually have our professional programs, including several of our health-related professional programs. We have a College of Health Solutions. We have a nursing school, and we're just announced,

We just announced this year two new schools under the ASU Health Initiative, one that is a unique ed, which is a school of medicine that will be admitting its first class this upcoming fall, in which every doc will also get an engineering degree. And the second school, which I'm happy to go into, but the second school is a school of public health technology. And as a technology guy, he's just got to love the fact that as we design what health care needs in the future or say, yeah, I mean, we need a lot of traditional docs to be sure,

but the doctors who can innovate in the AI economy of the future, devices, software, I mean, this is going to be hugely important. And also, obviously, health, you know, public health, not just public health in the traditional sense, but public health that's focused in on how to leverage technology. Again, great opportunity for, you know, a technology guy like me. Well, Lev, your team's probably going to hate me, but I'm going to be reaching out afterwards because I think we need to do an entire episode on that whole concept of the engineering and tech.

Engineering, tech and medicine because because you're right, the future healthcare providers are going to need to know how to prompt AI. They're going to need to know how all that works because that's the future of medicine. I'm convinced to that. Yeah, and then let's do that. And, you know, and I don't know if you do three sums or four. here, Ed, but the deans, I mean, we've recruited just remarkable talent. And, you know, we've recruited out of Cornell, you know, our dean of public health

technologies, JOTE is, you know, he's an AI data guy. He's fantastic. And, you know, we just, we were lucky we stole out of the NIH, you know, one of the great data analysts and data scientists, Holly is, she's fantastic. And she's leading this in, you know, again, medical school with an embedded engineering program, not so much jointly, but fused with the largest engineering school in the country. We have 32,000 engineering students at ASU, which is like three exercise of all of the case Western Reserve University. Everybody included is just in our engineering program, all

thinking on some of the most important issues of the day, which include our health outcomes, especially to be honest with you, our health outcomes here in the southwest and Arizona, for which, you know, we really have a responsibility as, you know, again, a mission-driven institution. Yeah, I'm inviting myself out. But if you do invite me, if I'm able to come out, I want to be in that car. Is that your podcast where you're in a Waymo? That's right. Yeah.

In fact, let's do that. You come out for your Iron Man. We will do a great carpool convo, we call it. Your viewers and listeners can see we've done three seasons, four seasons now. We're just about to craft the fifth season. In fact, we're taking it somewhat on the road. I know you're based in Dallas, but we're going to do some production in Austin because they have Waymo's. We're going to do that coming up.

We're going to do that in San Francisco as well. And this is a chance for me to get technology innovators, thought leaders, to talk about the future at the intersection of technology and learning. And we'd love to have you in that program. And I'll look forward to that. Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about, yeah, this is amazing. My head's just kind of exploding.

Let me ask you this question because, again, I've always seen you and you've already explained how this has been your whole life, mission focus and your whole trajectory. How do you stay connected and understand all the tech innovation that's happening and able to grasp it and then, you know, lead with it? Well, I gave you one of my secrets, which is that I try to hire personal coaches who are first-year students. And at ASU was such a great, large student buddy. Right now, I'm super lucky. We have about 350 students who work for us in the enterprise technology organization.

What a great, you know, what a great privilege to have these, again, smart students who don't even know what the answer of it can't be done. It means. Like, it doesn't compute, doesn't translate. And so, you know, we're constantly learning that way directly from students. I also, you know, again, being at an institution with such, you know, interesting interdisciplinary research, I'm always talking to faculty members and visiting their labs. Again, we have great partnerships with the companies like AWS. You know, they hire our students now while we actually have a, you know, what we call it,

an AI Cloud Innovation Center. And the premise is like we're going to create solutions together that are going to be open source and available for anyone out there to take. They're not higher education specific at all. In fact, several of them are public purposes serving the needs for cities, whether that is on transportation issues or on water management and things of that sort. They're developed by our students who they hire. And actually, they also bring on their own PMs and machine learning specialists and the like. So, you know, those are some of the ways. And then as you know, and my team unfortunately knows too well.

Like I read, I write, I'm always giving them things to read and encouraging them to write and to find out more. And to, you know, and to open up the, you know, basically our biggest job is CIOs, I think, is to open the aperture of the teams that we get a chance to work with. And, you know, because it's all about the people. I mean, it's all about our people. and the biggest challenges we face as professionals is actually finding ways of inspiring our own teams and in doing that, trying to open up the aperture so that they find themselves curious and inquisitive

and wanting to be of service to the mission of the organizations we work with. Yeah, that's fantastic. Where or what do you do, Lev, when you feel a little bit drained, maybe your creativity drained, or, you know, you're doing so much, you've got a great family,

and because we've been Facebook friends for a long time as well, so I could see that part. And, you know, where do you go? Is there a place that you go, whether it's internal, external? What do you do to just fill up? I do have a Zen experience. It's not necessarily what folks would experience, especially you, because I know a little bit about what you do to remain grounded and centered.

I love to cook. And so I'm an amateur wannabe chef. I was a sous chef in another life. And I love to get lost at it because it is total focus of things outside of the tyranny of the urgent that we deal with. I also love to travel. And I do my level best. My wife is incredibly forgiving. But when we do travel, I try my very best not to be online all the time.

I used to be able to get off the grid. I now work, as I say, for a unicorn of a present. who doesn't actually understand what that means because that's not how he lives. And so, you know, we do definitely live with a bit of a digital leash on that. But for me, travel, you know, going to markets, poking around in the spice markets that are available, learning, trying, I love to, when we do travel to go to cooking schools and have a chance to, again, combine, you know, travel and food, which are certainly part of my way of staying grounded.

Len, I was just wondering why I haven't had you on digital voices sooner and why I haven't stayed even more connected with you than I have. You're an amazing leader, but more importantly, an amazing human. We talked quite a bit about when we first met. We talked about jazz a little bit, you know, leading by example, being a player, coach model in terms of some of your philosophies. We talked about your life growing up in Canadian, but doing field work in Africa and India

and how that informed you of being part of academic family and how you got into tech and then how this pivotal moment with your daughter, sabbatical, in 1993, really changed things and grounded you for ASU for the future. Then we talk a lot about higher ed and all the different cool things that you're doing. There's so much more.

It was just running out of time. So much more I want to unpack and get into. But like I said, we're definitely going to talk again. And then we talk a little bit about leadership, but what you do to unplug, which is really important. What did I miss or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word. Well, again, thanks, for the opportunity to just have a conversation

with you. I have to say that I relished those opportunities back when we were working together in Cleveland. And again, if I have the last word, it's just really how important relationships are, the human relationships are. Our networks, you know, as I say, you know, our net worth is really our network. It's the network of humans, technology leaders, people we try to hopefully support and launch on their careers going forward. I think that's our role in responsibility. And it's It's really great for me to reconnect with you, Ed. Thanks for having me on. Levgonic, thank you.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts, so you don't miss an episode.