Andrew Lieberman’s ties to UVM started long before he arrived as a first-year student in 2009.

As the son of alumni Mitch ’89 and Bethany ’88 Lieberman, he grew up in a house full of Catamount pride. He remembers attending sports events, and when he was in eighth grade, even cut a picture of legendary basketball forward Taylor Coppenrath ’05 out of the newspaper that a teacher arranged to have signed. 

(He still has that clipping.)

Now, as an alumnus and member of the College of the Arts and Sciences’ Board of Advisors, he has upgraded that fandom. He still cheers on the Catamounts (even flying to North Carolina for the 2024 NCAA Men’s Soccer finals). But in addition to athletics wins, he’s focusing on helping today’s students be ready for their post-graduation lives, as employees in an increasingly high-tech world. And as citizens in a world in constant change.

An enthusiastic graduate of UVM’s History program, he deeply understands the value and importance of a broad-based, liberal arts education. He lauds and supports UVM’s “very high-quality education in abstract thinking and the specific skill set of critical thinking,” and the ways those take form in students with “UVM’s certain type of strong moral compass and strong ties to community.”

Offering Today's Students a Deep Dive into Meaningful Data

Three UVM teams presented to a panel that included Andrew, fellow College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Board of Advisors members, and faculty members.

To that he adds what he’s learned since graduating UVM in 2013, especially in his role as Director of Partner Management and Solution Engineering for the German tech firm Celonis.

He is deeply committed to making sure that today’s UVM students are ready to connect their broad-based learning and thinking with the employment landscape they’re approaching. 

A nuanced approach is required.

“UVM is a great institution, and the UVM edge is around big-picture, broad-based thinking and problem-solving.

“But the specific tools that today’s students are learning in the classroom won’t even be in use by 2029,” he observed. 

The particular technologies that drive today’s companies and organizations may be ephemeral, but the principles of using data, analyzing information, and testing solutions to complex problems will continue to matter a great deal. 

And, Andrew maintains, the graduates who know how to do these meaningfully will be the ones positioned to succeed and to effect change.

Enter this spring’s Celonis x UVM Competition, which is giving teams from across UVM access to the sophisticated software that the tech firm uses to help large companies and organizations analyze and improve their processes through “process mining,” described on the company’s website as a way to look at “how your processes actually run – not how you think they do.”

In the case of the 2026 event, this is the chance to make a difference in carbon emissions as well as the company’s travel expenses by analyzing at the travel data of actual Celonis employees, presenting a special opportunity to “marry the green line to the bottom line,” as Andrew describes it.  

Eye-Opening Data

Jonah Ballard, who was not only a one-person team representing CEMS, but also a winner of the competition.

For Ava Metzger, a senior with majors in environmental studies and psychology and a minor in economics, the chance to learn about process mining and see how it can make a difference for companies and for the planet, was as gratifying as it was revealing.

She told us, “Celonis has a lot of employees who travel around as part of their jobs, and in order to reach their ultimate goal of being net zero in carbon emissions by 2030, travel is a really efficient way to approach that reduction.

”Fellow graduating senior Annika Heintz (who took time away from preparations to defend her Honors College thesis to share her thoughts) was similarly both intrigued and appreciative.

She wrote, “As a senior looking for roles in sustainability (after graduation), getting the opportunity to work with real data and create a tangible and pragmatic proposal is a fantastic opportunity. It allows me to connect with people who are putting into practice principles that I have been learning about for the last four years and to connect with other UVM students passionate about sustainability across majors.” 

They were on a six-person team that included first-, second- and fourth-year CAS students.

“Most of our group has never done much coding or process mining or anything of the sort. We're all kind of social science majors, which is great, but now we’ve been given training in how to use data and this specific dashboard tool,” Ava marked.

The data was eye-opening.

“We tend to talk about people as the source of change, and I totally agree with that. And now I also see that this side, the data side, tells the facts, and maybe we should really be looking at that to get the sides of a process that people aren't able to fully understand.”

Ava says it has been illuminating to see in practice that people are able to make dramatic change just by looking at data that reveal what travel actually looks like for the company.“And then from there we're developing strategies to recommend for carbon reductions, as well as general simplification of their data framework.”

One of those recommendations would turn out to be working with traveling employees to use business-class seats. That’s important and may be a relatively easy change for the company to make, she notes, because “there is a large quantity of emissions that come from a first-class flight as opposed to business class.”

She explains that that is because, “the (environmental) footprint in a plane is calculated by space and resources that you take in proportion to the total emissions of that plane trip. And so first class is typically about triple the amount of business in terms of emissions. Part of our recommendation is that that's something we should move away from if possible. So I think our perspective on the data is that there are some fairly obvious ways to move around this from an environmental perspective.”

This line of thinking - analytical, responsive, realistic - was just what Andrew was hoping to help students engage in.“

There’s a reason that people do business travel, right? We know that. But the nature of this project is to see what recommendations and assessments students can make, at the same time being sensitive to how businesses are concerned with maintaining productivity while being sensitive to the green line. That's the ask of the project,” he said.

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Bill Falls is excited for the partnership and both the specific challenges and specific opportunities it presents to CAS students.

Giving students access to an actual business software platform as a means of addressing critical challenges is appreciated, and something he hopes might set the stage for other future collaborations – and the success of the school’s graduates.“

Unlike many other majors on campus, the liberal arts do not prepare students for a specific career. Instead, the liberal arts prepare students for countless careers,” he explained. “Experiences like this one with Celonis give students opportunities to practice their liberal arts skills in a career-relevant setting and gain valuable career-ready skills. Familiarity with the Celonis platform will help shape a student’s career choice and make them more competitive in the marketplace.”

The 2026 Celonis x UVM Challenge Event

Andrew Lieberman ’13 with the three teams who competed in the 2026 Celonis x UVM Decoding the Carbon Challenge.  Andrew is standing at left, next to Petr Polacek, Tanis McAuliffe, Everett Mader, Ava Metzger, Aidan Erickson, Ngoc Tran. Kneeling: Annika Heintz, Pavaani Ganeshkumar, Jonah Ballard. Missing from picture is CEMS team member Drew Ledger.

On April 16, the three final teams from UVM’s College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences came to present their findings, their thinking their recommendations to Andrew, to Associate Dean Paul Deslandes, and to Andrew’s fellow members of the CAS Board of Advisors Mike Dwyer ’87 and Sally Wiebe ’10.

“Everything is a job interview,” Andrew told the assembled group. And he made it clear that it is his intent to help UVM students approach that interview with the strongest possible likelihood of getting a great job offer.

Micro-credentialing and direct experiences like the participants’ deep dive into the Celonis platform are opportunities to “de-risk” their future applications in the job market, he told the students.

From the start of the event, two things were evident:

1. Having access to accurate information makes an enormous difference in crafting solutions.

   
   

   All teams focused on the human implications and changes that employees and managers would have to make. But having the data set that showed what people were really doing, alongside the climate and financial implications of their choices, meant that they were able to see more realistically what changes could be made, and what difference those changes could make.

   
   

   “How do you shift culture?” an event attendee wondered when learning about what the data had revealed. “Well, it’s not really a culture problem,” College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences senior Ballard offered. “It’s a system problem. If you design the system better and give people the right information, they can make better decisions.”

   
   

2. Andrew, fellow CAS Advisors, and faculty were excited to engage with students to build their knowledge, share real-world examples of opportunities and challenges, and think creatively about how to find workable solutions.

   
   

   The conversation, questions and answers were more reminiscent of a group of colleagues and peers trying to develop solutions than they were of what was, ostensibly, a contest.

   
   

   When Jonah shared that the data showed clear ways for the company to achieve 50% of their target reduction in one year, the whole room was excited. And when it was announced that two out of the three teams (Ava and Annika’s CAS team, as well as solo operator Jonah), had been designated as the winners, it had truly been evident all along that every person present in the room had abundant creativity and problem-solving skills to contribute to the effort.

The winners would receive gift cards, but the largest reward is clearly the experience they had, the connections and opportunities they were able to explore. And for the faculty and staff who are already looking forward to the next event, there’s a great deal of excitement to see all of the good that will come from what’s next – for UVM undergrads, for future employers, and for all the ways our shared environment will benefit.