Biographies of Board Members
Patty Gertz
Patrick Masson
Benn Oshrin
Tom Barton is Senior Director for Architecture, Integration & Security and Chief Information Security Officer at the University of Chicago, where he is responsible for technical architecture, security and compliance, and identity and access management. He had previous assignments as Director of IT Infrastructure and Director of Network Services at the University of Memphis, where he was a member of the mathematics faculty before turning to administration. He's active in the Internet2 Middleware Initiative/MACE, manages the Internet2 Grouper project, is a member of the InCommon Federation's Technical Advisory Committee, EDUCAUSE's Identity Management Working Group, and the CIC's IdM Task Force.
Susan has been working in ITS for Yale University for 35 years and has been involved with Jasig since it's first meeting in 2001. At Yale Susan has had many roles including architect and implementer of Yale's portal and identity management project lead. She is currently a Senior Solution Architect with responsibility for supporting and maintaining the Yale's Bedework based public event calendar suites. Susan has been on the board of Jasig directors since 2007 and has served in the role of secretary for three of those years. She led the development of the incubation process and is the founding chair of the incubation committee. Susan was an original uPortal developer, has chaired the Jasig conference committee, served on the CAS steering committee and is currently a member of the uMobile working group.
Tim Carroll has a degree in computer science and business administration with 18 years of experience in I.T., and he is a PMP certified project manager. Tim's I.T. experience is broad, holding roles in application development, database administration, quality assurance, project management, and service management. Currently, Tim is the Technical Program Director for two development teams and a process maturity team at the University of Illinois.Â
Tim's work at Illinois has afforded him the opportunity to become deeply involved with open source software. He has been an active member of the JASIG community for seven years, and has attended nearly every conference during that time and has presented on various topics. In the Fall of 2009, Tim coordinated and hosted the JASIG Unconference on the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign. Tim is the Treasurer on the Jasig Board of Directors, a Founding Board member of Apereo, and a founding member of the JASIG Incubation Committee. During this time, he has also been involved with other communities like Kuali and Cernunnos.Â
Jens Haeusser is the President and Chief Architect of Erudio Solutions, providing strategic IT consulting services including Enterprise Architecture and Identity Management solutions. Jens is a passionate advocate for the transformative role of Information Technology and the strategic advantage of open source software in higher education, and serves as the Chair of the Jasig Board of Directors. He is an active participant and frequent presenter and facilitator in many organizations at the provincial, national, and international level, including EDUCAUSE, Internet2, CANHEIT, CIPS, and BCNET. He plays a leadership role on Identity Management as a member of the Middleware Architecture Committee for Education, and on the steering committees of the Canadian Access Federation and the Global eduroam Governance Committee.
Jens joined the Jasig Board in 2006, serving as Treasurer from 2006-2009, Vice Chair from 2009-2010, and Chair from November 2010 on. Jens has also been elected as a founding board member of the Apereo Foundation.
From 2006 until 2012, Jens was the Director of Strategic Innovation in the Information Technology Department at the University of British Columbia. As an Enterprise Architect, he was responsible for fostering outstanding IT solutions throughout the highly decentralized UBC campus by developing creative and relevant IT strategies that anticipate and reflect broad campus needs, developing strategic relationships with faculties and administrative units, and building long-range plans for IT directions at UBC. Jens spent a decade as a departmental IT administrator before founding the UBC Information Security Office in 2003. In his role as Information Security Officer, he helped build a culture of security at UBC, developing security strategy and policy and leading an operational team that dramatically improved the IT security stance of the University. Jens was a member of the Internet2/Educause Security Task Force, and is past chair of the BCNET Security and Identity Management Working Groups.
Jim Helwig manages the Portal Infrastructure team and the Academic Portal Applications Development team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My UW-Madison has been the University's enterprise portal since 2000 and serves over 75,000 active users logging in over 2,000,000 times a month. He oversees daily operations of the campus portal and works with constituents from around campus on integrating existing content as well as developing new, innovative applications. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors of Jasig, Jim chairs the uPortal Steering Committee, facilitates Jasig's web presence and discussion lists, and has chaired or served on numerous conference planning committees. Prior to joining the University, Jim worked in private industry on distributed Internet applications. Jim holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
John Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. He is primarily responsible for the technology strategy of the company's solutions and services portfolio for higher education. John is a 20 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions include large-scale enterprise architecture, open source software, and agile development methods. John is an engaging and perspicacious person who seamlessly integrates the latest technologies into Unicon's higher education solutions and makes it possible for the company to deliver unique world-class services to its customers. Prior to joining Unicon in 2005, he was the Chief Technology Officer for Arcanum Education Solutions, providing specialized IT solutions to the K-12 education community.
After several years of rigorous software development work and study, John joined Andersen Consulting in 1993 and discovered his enthusiasm for providing technology-driven business solutions to customers. With Andersen, he was an integral part of designing and implementing mission-critical systems for customers including Intel and AT&T. In 1995, John joined Sybase, Inc. to start a new professional services practice for the company. He and his team delivered strategic technologies to customers including American Express and Motorola. In 1998, John united with several key associates to establish Arcanum International Corporation as a premier systems integration consulting firm that provided enterprise-class systems architecture and design services to customers including Motorola and Cisco. He also worked with several startup firms in the early 2000s as well as providing distributed systems operations and availability expertise for Charles Schwab.
John has been a long-time contributor and advocate in the open source software community since 1997. In addition to contributions to a number of different open source projects over the past 15 years, he was the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, the standards-based Java Portlet development framework that is part of the wildly popular Spring Framework project. He is active in several higher education open source communities, including Jasig, Sakai, and Kuali. John is an expert on open source licensing and intellectual property, as well as the governance and coordination of open source community and projects. John serves on the Board of Directors of Jasig, the organization that stewards several open source projects supporting higher education, including uPortal, CAS, and Bedework.
John's education includes a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Pepperdine University where he graduated Magna Cum Laude, and graduate studies in Computer Science at Arizona State University.
Patrick Masson is currently serving as the Chief Technology Officer for UMassOnline within the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President. UMassOnline supports education online across the five campus UMass system as well as several other public and private colleges and universities throughout the State. Prior to UMassOnline Mr. Masson served as the Chief Information Officer for The State University of New York, College of Technology at Delhi. Previous to his appointment at SUNY Delhi, Mr. Masson worked for The State University of New York's System Administration as the Director of Technology for Learning Environments supporting SUNY's e-learning platform, The SUNY Learning Network (SLN). Before SUNY, Mr. Masson was Director of the UCLA Media Lab.
Mr. Masson is the founder and co-chair of EDUCAUSE's Openness Constituent Group, he also founded Jasig's 2-3-98 project and is currently serving on the Jasig Board. Mr. Masson is the former Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect of the State University of New York's CIO Council and "SIG Master" for NERCOMP's Open Source in Higher Education Special Interest Group.
Mr. Masson has written for, and contributed to, The EDUCAUSE Review, EDUCAUSE Quarterly, EdTech Magazine, Inside Higher Education, Campus Technology and has presented at Campus Technology Magazine's annual conference, EDUCAUSE regional and national conferences, NERCOMP, Sakai's national conference, the Sloan-C Northeast Regional Conference, Jasig's National Conference, Academic Impressions, the SUNY Technology Conference, SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies and at multiple colleges and universities.
Benn Oshrin is an independent consultant with over a decade of experience with various aspects of IT in higher education, including affiliations with Yale, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Berkeley, and Internet2. He has recently been focusing on Identity Management, and is currently lead developer on the COmanage project (providing identity services for Virtual Organizations), as well as a founding member of the Open Source IDM for Higher Education (OSIdM4HE) initiative.
I am Director of Communications & Middleware Technologies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and have over 25 years experience in Higher Ed IT, first as a programmer, and subsequently in IT management. I hold a B.S. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany (now the "University at Albany"). Prior to coming to RPI, as best as I can remember, I was a programmer in various operating systems development groups at what was then Sperry Univac.
My present responsibilities at RPI include centralized email, directory, web services, mobile devices, identity management and middleware, and software development. Over my career at RPI, my responsibilities have covered almost all areas of centralized IT .
I am the Chair of the Bedework Steering Committee, and serve on the Jasig Board. I am president of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org). I also serve the board of the Capital District Library Council (http://www.cdlc.org), one of New York State's nine Reference and Research Library Resources Systems.
 Robert has been working in higher education for nearly 20 years now. He has worked at the number of institutions in the UK in a variety of roles and most recently has been at Hull for the last 13 years. At Hull he has held a number of posts, starting as the Intranet Development officer and is now the Head of Student Experience for Library and Learning Innovation. This role in addition to managerial responsibility for library services and eLearning, involves leaving and institutional project currently called eCommons which is looking to create a distinctive digital platform for learning and teaching and communications at Hull.
Robert has been on the board of Jasig directors for the last four years, in the role of vice-chair for the last two, and is also board liaison and Chair of the uMobile Working Group.