Robert Mackin is the Associate Director of Access Management at The Ohio State University, where he leads identity and access management (IAM) strategy and access operations for a complex, mission‑driven higher education environment. His work focuses on designing secure, scalable, and user‑centered identity services that support teaching, research, medical, and lifelong learning while balancing privacy, governance, and risk.

Robert brings deep hands‑on experience across federation, authentication, identity lifecycle management, privileged access, and access governance, and has spent much of his career navigating the real‑world challenges of long‑lived, multi‑role identities common in higher education. He regularly works at the intersection of security architecture, identity standards, and organizational change, helping institutions adapt legacy IAM models to modern cloud, zero‑trust, and customer‑centric expectations.

As higher education identity increasingly resembles customer and public identity models, Robert is particularly interested in how CIAM principles, identity orchestration, verified credentials, and AI‑assisted risk signals can improve trust and experience without sacrificing institutional values. He is a frequent collaborator across campus, translating identity concepts into clear business and risk outcomes for technical and non‑technical stakeholders alike.