Douglas S. Gale

Prior to founding Information Technology Associates in 2002 Gale served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at two research universities (the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and George Washington University) and as a tenured faculty member in both Computer Science and Physics. During his career he has authored over 80 publications and received $7.7 million dollars in external grants. His career also includes service as a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation where he received the Director’s Award for Program Officer Excellence for his work on the NSFNET initiative.

He in nationally recognized as one of higher education’s network visionaries have played a key role in the creation of the Internet, Internet2, and more recently national and regional dark fiber networks. An early advocate of higher education dark fiber networks, he has been the architect of two, the Third Frontier Network in the State of Ohio and the Five Colleges Dark Fiber Network in Massachusetts.

His practical experience in wide area networking includes designing and deploying two high performance campus networks as well as two regional networks (MIDnet and the Washington Research and Education Network) and managing a non-profit Internet Service Provider that provided Internet connectivity to over 88 colleges and universities and over two million end users.

Gale has served on the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Research and Education Networking (CREN) where he was Vice President, the Board of Directors of CAUSE where he was treasurer, the Board of Directors of the MINDS Institute that developed software for the K-12 sector, and the Akamai Technologies Education Advisory Board.

Gale received his Ph.D. in Physics from Kansas State University in 1972 and resides in Big Sky, Montana.