Senior Associate Vice President, Finance and Business Services, Maureen Pasag is pleased to announce Christi Opitz as our new Senior Director of Budget Planning and Financial Management. She will join SJSU on June 17, 2024. This position works with campus leadership in planning, creating, and administering the $750 million campus budget, which includes five auxiliaries, NCAA Division I athletics and a compensation benefit pool. In addition to the campus operating budget, this position oversees the campus and auxiliary capital budget and debt program. This position influences university-wide strategies and decisions which have a high level of exposure and potential for a material influence on campus fiscal health or public perception; provides leadership to coordinate and prepare budgetary recommendations with each university VP; and participates in several university-wide committees.
Christi spent the first part of her career creating investment strategies for endowments, foundations, and pension plans at Cambridge Associates, where many of her clients were colleges and universities. She later shifted to corporate finance roles in Silicon Valley, where she enjoyed doing long-term financial planning for several tech companies. Most recently she returned to the university and nonprofit worlds. At Stanford she managed a project to change the way financial aid is distributed at the business school and then helped the School of Medicine’s finance department navigate COVID. She also worked at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation where she built new business processes as part of the organization’s initiative to reinvent itself in the wake of leadership changes.
Christi studied International Relations and Spanish at the University of Redlands and holds an MBA in Finance and HR from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA.
She lives with her husband and teenage son in Mountain View.
