Maureen Knight-Burrell, director of applications development and operations in Northwestern IT, was Foster’s manager, mentor and friend for much of her time at Northwestern. After seeing her development of CTEC for the Registrar’s Office, she hired Foster to rewrite CTEC as an online tool using a vendor’s enterprise system.
“Tamara was very innovative in that space. She conceived, developed and implemented the entire CTEC system for the CAESAR application,” Knight-Burrell said.
“She later collaborated with a vendor partner to build our current CTEC suite in a cloud application integrated with CAESAR. Northwestern still widely uses the vendor product, and Tamara’s CTEC suite design has benefited many other universities. It was an important innovation for Northwestern and just one of the many she was instrumental in during her time at the University.”
Foster joined the technical advisory board of the Higher Education User Group for the ORACLE PeopleSoft enterprise systems, the platform that runs CAESAR, myHR and NUfinancial applications, becoming one of the first women to serve in the tech product group, working directly with Oracle strategists and tech leaders in higher ed to make continuous improvements to the PeopleSoft tools and applications.
Julie Phelan, now HR operations manager, took Foster’s HTML class as an undergraduate, which led to her Northwestern career in programming and IT. She remembers Foster not only leading the University website creation, but also feeling the need to take that knowledge and disperse it.
“She would learn, digest, teach and then mentor. Then, she’d repeat that with the next new thing,” Phelan said. “Tamara would jump into new things and then drag us all with her.”
Jaci Casazza, assistant provost for university records and University Registrar, recalled Foster’s talent for creative problem solving and her deep care for the Northwestern community.
“Northwestern seemed to be so much more to her than a job or an alma mater, but a community. She helped other women as they advanced in their careers, always guiding and providing feedback and support. I certainly benefited from that, as did the other women, and probably so many more people than I can imagine,” Casazza said.
“Among many other things, she supported course and teacher evaluations for years. I remember many meetings when it was clear that she felt strongly about facilitating this feedback and ensuring anonymity for students, so they felt free to honestly share their experiences. Her work was behind the scenes, but the way she did it illustrated her care for the people that make up this community.”
Foster’s friends, family and colleagues celebrated her grace, positivity and empathy during a memorial service at Alice Millar Chapel on Saturday, April 26.
She is survived by her spouse, Bernie Foster, who also worked at Northwestern; children Karl and Michelle Yvette Iversen Everly ’19, MS ’22, son-in-law Grant Everly ’19, grandchild Eli Foster, as well as her sisters and numerous nieces and nephews.
