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[Elizabeth Boten <>]

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Contact: Liz Boten,

Internet2 Announces 2015 Technology Exchange Scholarship Recipients

 

CLEVELAND, OH, Oct. 6, 2015— Today, Internet2 announced the recipients of the 2015 Technology Exchange scholarships. The scholarships recognize talented individuals seeking opportunities to gain hands-on network and cloud experience by attending the event, and spotlights women in the field of IT and their efforts to use technology to serve the faculty, staff and students of the institution.

 

“It is an honor to recognize and support women in the field who are paving the way for others, and working diligently to use technology in meaningful ways that support the goals of their institutions,” said Ana Hunsinger, Internet2, vice president of community engagement. “The Internet2 community remains committed to ensuring the IT field is diverse and inclusive and we congratulate this year’s award recipients.”

 

The award recipients are:

 

Gender Diversity Awards

Sarah Bailey, web and cloud services manager, College of Arts and Sciences, Case Western Reserve University

 

Bailey has worked at Case Western Reserve University since 2008, and as the web and cloud services manager for the College of Arts and Sciences for the past year. In this time, the department has added and piloted several Internet2 cloud services that are part of the NET+ initiative, such as Box.net, Canvas, Amazon AWS, CrashPlan, and Splunk. Bailey also serves on Google Groups and Learning Management System advisory committees for the university, working closely with colleagues in the central ITS Division and with others around campus.

 

“Attending the Technology Exchange is a wonderful opportunity for me to become more involved in the technology and cloud services communities,” said Bailey. “I look forward to building connections with others as well as learning about new products, services, and techniques that could be beneficial to our constituents.”

 

Gourija S. Menon, senior application architect, Application Development and Integration: Identity Team Vanderbilt University Information Technology

 

Menon currently works as the senior application architect for the VUIT Identity Application Development and Integration (ADI-Identity) team, and her primary focus is designing identity solutions to meet the unique needs of the institution. VUIT provides IT and IT related services to more than 50,000 in the Vanderbilt community. This community consists of Vanderbilt University and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Menon has 14 years of experience in designing and coding Java and JEE based applications. 

 

“Vanderbilt community members require access to myriad internet applications and resources to perform their day to day tasks. To fulfill this need, it is essential to have a fully functional and automatically provisioned online identity and account from day one. It is also of paramount importance to secure these identities against password hacks and data compromises and ensure that their access is automatically reevaluated for entitlement changes on role change or termination,” said Menon.

 

These scholarships support the attendance of emerging information technology women and early career professionals at Internet2 conferences, propelling their entry into the IT field and the Internet2 community. 

 

Gender Diversity Award, in recognition of Carrie Regenstein 

Chris M. Collins, founder and technical team lead for the Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research (UCSIM), Division of Innovation & Partnerships, Research & Development, UC Office of Information Technologies (UCIT), University of Cincinnati

 

Collins has spent 14 years in the IT department at the University of Cincinnati in a variety of positions. Currently, Collins is responsible for overseeing the general operation of the Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research, including identifying new and emerging immersive technologies for academic and research projects on campus, as well as developing partnerships and funding opportunities with industry and government agencies.

 

Although she initially had little interest in pursuing a technical career, Collins’ early experiences introducing faculty to academic technologies as a student worker changed her career path.  

 

“I couldn’t imagine back then how thrilling it would be to create something new that people find useful, or how wonderful it is to empower others to use technology for their own goals,” said Collins. “Even today, many IT professionals do not explicitly associate working in technology with public service, though in large part, the purpose of our work is about solving human problems, improving living conditions, and making society better. We just don’t talk about it that way.”

 

This scholarship was created for women recognized as "generalists," whose focus is on the use of technology to serve the faculty, staff and students of her institution. 

 

“It is more important than ever that our work contribute directly and significantly to institutional mission and goals. A diverse IT community of professionals provides more — and more creative — ways of fulfilling that value proposition. It is a privilege to work together to support Internet2’s development of communities and the advancement of scholarship," said Carrie Regenstein, Associate Vice Provost for Computing Services (retired), Carnegie Mellon University; Faculty member, Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) Leadership Institute. 

 

Additional scholarship recipients include:

 

Brocade Scholarship

Marisa Brazil, program manager, research computing, ASU

 

Brazil has more than eight years of experience in the engagement and support of ASU’s research community that utilizes high performance computation and large-scale data. She manages the outreach programs and initiatives that provide the computational resources that enable research for ASU’s faculty and students.

 

“Attending this event will help me capitalize on the knowledge shared by leaders in the field so that I may share that with my institutional research community,” said Brazil. “Additionally, I am interested in learning more about the challenges facing other institutions and how they are working to address them.”

 

Brocade’s scholarshipwas presented to Brazil as an opportunity to attend the 2015 Technology Exchange to gain hands-on experience using OpenFlow to enable a high-speed science DMZ.

 

Skyhigh Scholarship

Ludwig Gantner, network architect, Virginia Tech

 

Gantner works as a network architect for the Unified Communications service at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is responsible for the research, design, implementation, and management of new cloud based services, network management tools, and certificate technologies. Gantner is also the Manager of the Enterprise Communications Applications group, responsible for the coordination of application and database deployments in legacy and hypervisor based environments.

 

“We are currently in the process of hypervisor based infrastructure that will allow greater flexibility and network control for managing our SDN based architecture,” said Gantner. “This scholarship will help me to learn about the OpenFlow standard and technologies, to determine how we can optimize and streamline our existing network as well as to be able to adapt our design for future implementations.”

 

Skyhigh’s scholarship was presented to Gantner to provide the opportunity to gain experience and knowledge in cloud security, compliance, and enablement to enforce data loss prevention policies.

 

The Internet2 Technology Exchange convenes U.S. and global technology leaders and visionaries including pioneers, technologists, architects, scientists, operators and students in the fields of networking, security, trust and identity, virtualization, cloud services, high-performance computing, and storage to share expertise and facilitate the cross-pollination of technical ideas and information. Internet2 will host more than 600 attendees at the conference this week in Cleveland.

 

 

 

About Internet2

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Internet2® is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research and community service missions.

Internet2 also operates the nation’s largest and fastest, coast-to-coast research and education network, with Internet2 Network Operations Center powered by Indiana University. Internet2 serves more than 90,000 community anchor institutions, 290 U.S. universities, 70 government agencies, 42 regional and state education networks, 84 leading corporations working with our community and more than 65 national research and education networking partners representing more than 100 countries.

Internet2 offices are located in Ann Arbor, MI; Denver, CO; Emeryville, CA; Washington, DC; and West Hartford, CT. For more information, visit www.internet2.edu or follow @Internet2 on Twitter.