Mr. Jack Suess was appointed the first Chief Information Officer of UMBC in July 2000. Jack is an alum of UMBC (B.A. Mathematics '81, M.S. Information Systems '95). Jack first came to UMBC as a student in 1976. In 1979 he began working for what was then called the Computer Center as a student consultant. As a student, Jack was involved in a number of application development projects and upon graduation was hired as a programmer/analyst in June 1981.

In August 1982, UMBC purchased it's first mainframe, a CDC 720, for support of academic computing. Jack was assigned as a system programmer supporting the CDC system. Over the next twenty years Jack led most of the major infrastructure projects at UMBC:

• 1984 - Migration from CDC to Digital Equipments VMS
• 1985 - Implementation of the first Ethernet network at UMBC
• 1986 - Deployment of the first Unix machine on campus
• 1986 - UMBC joins BITNET for email and file transfers
• 1987 - UMBC is connected to the Arpanet (now called Internet)
• 1988 - UMBC establishes the first Unix computing lab
• 1992 - Named Asst. Director of Academic Computing, Jack planed the purchases and oversaw the opening of the Engineering/Computer Science building at UMBC.
• 1993 - Led the development of the first UMBC web site at UMBC.
• 1994 - Developed and oversaw the implementation of the master plan for the campus network to connect every student, faculty, and staff member.
• 1995 - Developed plans for linking our administrative systems to the web
• 1997 - Named Director of University Computing. Jack wrote and was the Principal Investigator for UMBC's NSF grant to develop a high-speed Internet connection through the NSF vBNS program.
• 1999 - Coordinated UMBC Year 2000 efforts
• 2000 - Principal investigator for UMBC's entry as an "Early Adopter" for the Internet2 middleware initiative
• 2001 - Named Project Director for UMBC's Peoplesoft project

He is a frequent speaker on higher education technology and has presented and given tutorials at the ALN, Educause, and Internet2 confereences. He is the co-chair of the Educause/Internet2 Security Task Force and has served on a number of national committees with regards to security

Beyond technology, Jack is very active in the UMBC community. Jack has served as a four-time Senator in the Associate Staff Senate, chaired the Facilities Management Committee (1997-2001), served on the student life task force, is very active in the UMBC alumni association, and an avid supporter of UMBC athletics.

For more information on Mr. Suess please visit his web site, http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jack/jack.html