Staff Highlight: UCM Internal Communications Team

The internal communications team within University Communications and Marketing aims to:

• Inform, engage, inspire and celebrate Carnegie Mellon University's staff, faculty and students
• Enhance everyone's understanding of the university's vision, mission, values and priorities;
• Build community, culture and pride

The team works collaboratively with campus partners to plan and execute effective internal communications and share timely and relevant news and information through The Piper newsletter, CMU events calendar, mass emails, website content and other internal channels.

In 2024, the team launched a redesign of The Piper. It also is rolling out a new calendar platform called LiveWhale, which aims to help create consistency in the look of school/college/unit event calendars and make it easier to share events across calendars without requiring duplicated efforts.

If you have news to share, submit it for inclusion in The Piper or the University Events Calendar. You also can suggest CMU colleagues for Staff Spotlight stories in The Piper.

Meet the Team

Jen Roupe, director

• How long have you worked at CMU? It will be two years at the end of September 2025.
• What's your must-see TV show? My go-to TV shows are "Law & Order SVU" — in another life, I would have been Olivia Benson – as well as "Ted Lasso," "Schitt's Creek," "The Good Place" and "Community," which always make me laugh.
• How did you end up in your current job? I majored in psychology and started working on my Ph.D. before realizing it wasn't for me. I've always enjoyed writing, so I switched grad programs and got a master's in journalism instead. I worked in college sports information at Yale, Johns Hopkins and Wake Forest before moving back to Pittsburgh to get married. I did public relations for the Pittsburgh Zoo for a year and worked in comms at Robert Morris University for seven years. I then took the opportunity to build and lead my own marcom team at Shady Side Academy, where I stayed for 15 years (and my two kids got an excellent education) before making the move back to higher ed at CMU.
• What's the most memorable moment of your career? I was the PR person at the Pittsburgh Zoo during the 2001 gorilla escape, when a 150-pound gorilla climbed out of its enclosure and wandered into the food court to raid some tables and trash cans, sending guests screaming and the zoo into full lockdown. (No one was hurt, and the gorilla was eventually cornered and tranquilized.) I spent the next week handling hundreds of media interviews locally, nationally and even internationally. Talk about crisis communications!
• What's the best piece of work-related advice you've received? When the stuff hits the fan, there are two kinds of people: the kind that freak out and don't know what to do, and the kind that get to work figuring out what to do. Every organization needs more of the latter.

Yana Ilieva, manager

• How long have you worked at CMU? Since March 2021.
• What is your favorite local lunch spot? The Cafe Carnegie in the Art/Natural History museum is super adorable. Its menu rotates seasonally and always has a great mix of comfort food done well as well as some fun experimental dishes.
• What's your hobby? I foster cats! Last year, the cat rescue with which I volunteer was told about two groups of kittens that were found at Kennywood. I ended up fostering a bunch of those kittens and their mom. The kittens have all been adopted now, and the two moms — named Agnes and Mildred, after the daughter and granddaughter of the Kennywood family — ended up bonding and are now best of friends.
• What's in your Netflix queue? I always have some version of "Love is Blind" on deck. It's a silly show, but it's fun to watch the (few) real relationships that develop and the messiness that ensues from the make-believe and/or partially formed relationships. Some of the international versions are cool because they show how different cultural contexts and expectations shape people's behavior and willingness to act silly or wild on TV. "Love is Blind Japan" especially is quite sweet.

Rob Biertempfel, manager

• How long have you worked at CMU? Since March 2025.
• What's your must-see TV show? My wife and I recently finished watching the finale of "Mythic Quest" and are eagerly awaiting the start of season five of "Slow Horses" on Apple TV. Until then, we're trying to knock out the entire run of "Babylon Berlin" (auf Deutsch, of course, with lots of help from the English subtitles).
• Have you ever had a celebrity encounter? Working as a sportswriter for 30 years, I got kind of jaded being around pro athletes. The exception was a sweltering afternoon in July 2018, when I found myself on a stage with some of the greatest players in baseball history, who were waiting for me to deliver a speech at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Someone asked if I'd mind if a last-minute guest took the empty seat next to me. No problem, I said. A few minutes later, the latecomer arrived. I turned to say hello and was gobsmacked to shake hands with … Hammerin' Hank Aaron, baseball's true home run king and one of my boyhood idols. We chatted for about 10 minutes — "Please, call me Hank," he said with a soft smile — and I am happy to report he truly was a humble and delightful person. To my eternal regret, I didn't have the guts to break protocol and take a selfie with Hank.
• Do you have a prized possession — something cherished, not necessarily valuable? My father was an Army medic in the late 1950s. He never bragged about his time in the service. In fact, he rarely spoke of it at all unless I dug out the cigar box that held a handful of uniform patches and black-and-white snapshots of him at a military base in West Germany. He did his job well and honorably, then returned home to raise a family. A peacetime soldier, my dad never faced enemy fire on a battlefield, but that made him no less a hero in my eyes. About a decade ago, after Dad finally lost his final battle against cancer, I found one of his dog tags in that musty cigar box and attached it to my key fob. When I'm stressed or worried, I'll pull that small, shiny metal tag out of my pocket and smile as I think of my father — still reporting for duty after all these years.