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2005 ORION Award Winners
The ORION Award was launched in 2005, when Ontario's Research and Education community joined with ORION to acknowledge and celebrate the contribution of Ontario's Internet pioneers. The first awards were presented during the Ontario R&E Summit, in Toronto, on June 13, 2005.
Learn more about the history of advanced networking in Ontario at this link.
Recipients of the 2005 Award, from left, Roger Watt of the University of Waterloo; President of the University of Windsor and founding Chair of ORANO Dr. Ross H. Paul; CANARIE President and CEO Andrew K. Bjerring; ORANO Board Chair and York University VP of Research and Innovation Dr. Stan Shapson (presenter); Robert Chambers of the University of Toronto; Ontario Corporate Chief Strategist Joan McCalla; Eugene Siciunas of the University of Toronto; ORION President/CEO Phil Baker (presenter); past executive-director of ONet Networking Roger Taylor; retired advanced networking leader Warren C. Jackson; and John Drake of McMaster University.
Andrew K. Bjerring
President and CEO CANARIE
After being a founding member and Secretary of CANARIE’s Board of Directors and of its pre-incorporation executive committee, Andrew Bjerring became President and CEO in October, 1993. Over the past two decades, Mr. Bjerring has also participated on numerous other boards and councils dealing with advanced networking and related applications. He is currently Chair of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Information Technology of the National Research Council and is a member of the boards of the Communications Research Centre, the C3.ca high performance computing association and the SHARCNET’s regional HPC consortium. He has also participated on several federal government advisory councils and panels, including those dealing with Government on Line, the Canadian e-Business Initiative, the National Broadband Task Force, the BRAND program national selection committee, SchoolNet, Health Infostructure and the Community Access Program. He was a member of the Board of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority from 2000-2003, Chair of the Ontario regional network (ONet) from its founding in 1988 until 1991, and founding treasurer of CA*net Networking Inc. in 1990 and a member of the Board until 1997. Prior to his appointment at CANARIE, Mr. Bjerring held various positions at the University of Western Ontario, including Assistant Provost, Assistant Vice President (Academic Planning and Budgeting) and Senior Director for Information Technology Services. He obtained his B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, and his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario.
Robert H. Chambers
Manager, Computing and Network Services, University of Toronto
Robert Chambers has been actively involved in IP networking for more than 15 years. He managed the engineering and operations teams responsible for Canada’s first national Research and Education IP network, CA*net. He has been a member of technical committees guiding work on CANARIE’s national research and education networks. He directed staff delivering engineering and operations support for the provincial ONet network, including the establishment of its two GigaPops. He was a significant contributor to the initial design of the ORION network and assisted ORANO in its early stages in the area of technology selection. He was active in the formation of GTAnet, the Toronto regional advanced research network, and currently manages the provision of implementation and operation services in support of GTAnet’s network. At the University of Toronto, Robert manages groups responsible for the development, implementation, operation and management of the institutional networks. He has degrees in mathematics and physics and astronomy.
John Drake
Director, School of Geography and Geology, McMaster University
John Drake is currently Professor and Director of the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University. From 1987-97 Mr. Drake was Assistant Vice-President for Information Services and Technology at McMaster and was very involved in the early development of the Canadian Internet as a board member and Chair of ONet Networking and a founding Director of ONet Inc. During this time the Ontario internet developed from the limited 19.2kbps network supported by the Ontario Centre for Large-Scale Computing to a megabit provincial system. John was also a board member of CA*net Inc. and was involved in the development of the initial national Internet backbone, as well as with the telecom deregulation hearings. In 1997 he led the Canadian Foundation for Innovation - CANARIE Consultation on Information Technology Infrastructure for Research, and later was involved in the Government of Ontario’s Enterprise Architecture and with the beginnings of ORION. During this appointment McMaster pioneered the widespread adoption of a number of technological advances including Universal Networking, email and voicemail for faculty staff and students; digital high speed printing/copying; student self-serve information systems; and distributed electronic business forms. Mr. Drake’s undergraduate studies at Oxford University led to graduate work in hydrology and water chemistry at McMaster.
Warren Jackson
Warren Jackson received his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Riverside and a Post Doctoral Research Fellow from the University of Toronto, High Energy Physics Group. From June 2000 until August 2003, Mr. Jackson was a Russian Network Feasibility Consultant at NATO Scientific Affairs Division where he assessed the financial, technical and organizational aspects of projects that applied to NATO for funding. He was Director of Special Projects, Information and Diagnostic Services at the Hospital for Sick Children from June 1994 to June 2001. At the same time, Mr. Jackson served on the Board of ONet Networking, and was Chair of the Board for two years. From January 1983 until May 1994, Mr. Jackson was Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS), and Interim Director for the Ontario Centre for Large Scale Computation (Cray Super Computer Centre). Under his leadership, a consortium from U of T (lead), IBM and Insync (a bandwidth reseller) produced an unsolicited proposal for the establishment, management and operation of a national backbone network to prove its feasibility to the National Research Council. The team then obtained funding from the NRC for the startup of CA*net. Mr. Jackson chaired a meeting of all provincial representatives, where a management and equitable fee structure was decided upon, and the governance of CA*net was turned over to the new management organization. Mr. Jackson was one of the three founding signatories of the formal ONet Networking incorporation. UTCS did the design, implementation and operation of ONet for ONet Networking.
Joan McCalla
Corporate Chief Strategist, Management Board Secretariat Government of Ontario
Joan McCalla was appointed Corporate Chief Strategist in the Ontario government’s information and information technology (I&IT) organization in May 1999. Ms. McCalla has been with the Ontario government since 1977 in various planning and policy positions at several ministries, including directing the development and implementation of the provincial telecommunications and computing sector provincial infrastructure strategies while with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and the Ministry of Culture and Communications. In the late 1980’s, Ms. McCalla directed the development of the provincial Telecommunications Strategy working with a task force made up of senior industry and other representatives from across Ontario (“the Tapscott report”). As a direct result of this strategy, the Ontario government began to utilize the Internet as part of its delivery infrastructure for the first time and the Ontario Network Infrastructure Program (ONIP) was approved as a means to support the development and use of networks across Ontario. During this time, Ms. McCalla also served as Ontario’s first representative on the multi-party committee formed by Industry Canada that eventually resulted in the formation of CANARIE. She continued to take an active role in supporting the Ontario networking community including the development and implementation of the successor program to ONIP, the Telecommunications Access Partnership initiative. Ms. McCalla also took on responsibility for implementation of the provincial computing strategy designed to support a strong computing sector in Ontario. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto (M.Sc. Urban and Regional Planning) and the University of Alberta (B.A. Honours Geography).
Dr. Ross Paul
President, Univrsity of Windsor, Founding Chair of ORANO
A native of Montreal, Dr. Ross H. Paul came to the University of Windsor as its fifth President early in 1998 immediately after serving almost seven years as President of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario and 11 years at Alberta’s Athabasca University. A graduate of Bishop’s, McGill and London universities, Dr. Paul has particular interest in the sociology of organizations and the management of higher education. He is best known for his 1990 book, Open Learning and Open Management: Leadership and Integrity in Distance Education and is a frequent contributor of book chapters and journal articles on the management of technology and higher learning. Past Chair of the Board of World University Service of Canada (WUSC), Dr. Paul has long been active in the Council of Ontario Universities, currently as Vice-Chair, Chair of Government and Community Relations, and member of the Executive Committee and the Working Group on University Capacity. He is immediate past Founding Chair of the Optical Research Advanced Network of Ontario (ORANO), represents Canada’s universities on the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council (CAPC) and is a member of the Board of Directors of AUTO21, the Network of Centres of Excellence for the Automobile of the 21st Century, and the Windsor and District Chamber of Commerce. He is also a member of the Ontario Minister’s Advisory Committee on Arts and Culture and a National Governor of the Shaw Theatre Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. He previously served as the founding President of CREAD, a distance education consortium for all of the Americas, and as Vice-President (North America) for the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE). He has traveled and consulted widely on management and distance education issues, notably through CIDA projects in Thailand, China, Sri Lanka and Jordan; comparative education tours of the former Soviet Union, Israel (two), and the United States (two); as a visiting professor in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and through conference and speaking engagements throughout Europe, South Asia, China and Latin America. For his widespread community activities, he was awarded the Governor General’s Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Confederation in 1992 and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002.
Eugene Siciunas
Director, Computing & Networking Services, University of Toronto
Mr. Siciunas’ educational background is in Engineering Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto where he has been employed in various roles in Computing Services since 1973. He became Associate Director in 1981 and a Director in 1992. Currently Mr. Siciunas is responsible for the direction and support of the resources that design, implement, manage and operate the TCP/IP backbone networks at the University of Toronto and GTAnet, among others. He was involved in establishing a connection from the U of T to NSFnet (precursor to the Internet) at Cornell in 1988 to a long-standing and continual association with various national, regional and local TCP/IP networks. He coordinated the successful responses to NRC’s RFI and RFP in 1988 and 1989 for the creation of a National Research Network. Mr. Siciunas planned and managed the implementation of CA*net in 1990 and its subsequent “commercialization” transfer to Bell Advanced Communications in 1995. When ONet incorporated in 1994, Mr. Siciunas became a member of ONet’s Board of Directors, and served as Treasurer from 1998 until 2003. He participated in the inaugural meeting of GTAnet, the region’s advanced research network on September 14, 2001 and became a member of GTAnet’s Board of Directors at its first Annual General Meeting in October 2003, serving to date as its Treasurer. Mr. Siciunas also led the contract negotiations with GroupTelecom for the IRU for GTAnet’s dark fibre.
Roger Taylor
Roger Taylor has a PhD in condensed matter physics. Starting in 1965 he enjoyed a distinguished career at the National Research Council in Ottawa doing fundamental research in the theory of simple metals. He was a world leader in this area of physics when he made a shift in careers in 1986 by accepting an appointment to the position of Director General of Informatics at NRC. During his four year tenure in that position Dr. Taylor enunciated a vision of a national high speed R&E network in Canada, co-led the movement to establish the network and secured the funding to get it started, all of this leading to the creation of CA*net in 1990. Following a brief consulting career, he joined the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC as Executive Officer in the Division of Networking and Communications Research & Infrastructure. There he was involved in several different projects including NSFnet, the Global Schoolhouse and the Global Observation and Information Network, a project to enable the exchange of global change data between Japan and the United States. In 1995 Dr. Taylor moved back to Canada as Executive Director of ONet Networking, a position which he held for more than eight years. ONet was Ontario’s first IP network. It was set up in 1988 by the R&E community to provide them with Internet connectivity. During his time with ONet Dr. Taylor was an advocate for the vision that led to the creation of the new high speed R&E network and is very well-known within Canada’s R&E networking community.
Roger Watt
Group Director, Systems, Information Systems and Technology, University of Waterloo
Mr. Watt joined the University of Waterloo’s central IT department in 1968, after five years as a University of Waterloo student where he obtained a B.Sc and a M.Math. From 1994 through 2004, Mr. Watt was a member of the Board of Directors, ONet Networking, Chair [1994-1996], Secretary [1996-1998], and Membership Coordinator [1999-2001]. He was a founding member of the CA Domain Registration Committee which consisted of representatives from various Canadian networking communities that oversaw the assignment of ".CA" Internet domain names until it was replaced by CIRA in 2000. Mr. Watt participated in the Joint CA*net/BAC Technical and Review Committees that made recommendations on the evolution of CA*net and the underlying ATM facility shared by CA*net Networking, CANARIE, and Bell Advanced Communications. Mr. Watt was a participant on both formation committees for the ONet and NetNorth networks. He was part of the NetNorth Strategic Planning Committee, to chart a course from the NJE to the IP protocol. Mr. Watt was a coordinator for the ONet Association’s NetNorth to Internet conversion project and was the secretary/Chair for the Administration Committee of the NetNorth Consortium. Mr. Watt was a participant in the formation of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and represented CA*net Networking and ONet Networking on an ad-hoc committee to establish a Canadian point of interconnection for the major Internet Service Provider companies in Canada.
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