The University of North Texas has tapped a 17-year veteran of academic fundraising to be its next vice president for advancement.

Lisa Baronio

Lisa Baronio, 48, will join the administration in January, after a four-year stint as the vice president for development for the University of Connecticut Foundation. She will replace Greg McQueen, who will retire Dec. 31 after serving five years in the spot.

Baronio was one of two candidates UNT President Gretchen Bataille brought to the Denton campus a second time before making an offer. Although it was a hard choice to make, Baronio had the experience the university needs, Bataille said.

“She’s done it all,” Bataille said. “She’s worked at a public university. She’s worked with academic planning and its process in relation to fundraising.”

The job offer didn’t come with a specific fundraising goal, both Bataille and Baronio said. But both sides understand that UNT in Denton has put top-tier, research-status ambitions in its sights, Bataille said.

Achieving that comes primarily from greatly increasing the amount of research done at UNT, but also from the size of the university’s endowment.

For UNT to seek funding from the state’s newly approved National Research University Fund, the university would need to increase its endowment fund to a required minimum.

“That’s $400 million, and we’re only 25 percent the way there, and she knows that,” Bataille said.

Baronio points to her most recent success at the University of Connecticut, where annual fundraising went from $31 million in 2006 to $56.6 million in 2008. Her personal portfolio of about 80 donors brought $1 million to $2 million each year, so most of the growth came from the fundraising group she supervised.

“I was very proud of my team,” Baronio said.

Before working at the University of Connecticut, Baronio was the associate vice president for development at the Wichita State University Foundation in Kansas from 2001 to 2005.

From 1993 to 2001, she worked her way up the ranks at the University of Nebraska Foundation. Prior to that appointment, she was IBM’s director of marketing to the university and other institutional customers in Omaha.

With friends and family living in several North Texas cities, Baronio said she and her family are still house-hunting, particularly since they must sell their home in Connecticut first.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.