Rodney Wilson, Chief Technologist, Research and Education Networking of Ciena

Biography:

Mr. Wilson is responsible for Ciena’s leadership & global interactions with universities and the research community, including national research and education networks. His particular focus is on collaboration with advanced highperformance networks being created by national government for research and education purposes. These networks experiment with emerging, pre-commercial hardware and software solutions. Mr. Wilson directs Ciena’s involvement with these research networks. Further, representing Ciena’s CTO organization, he orchestrates intersections between emerging technologies and Ciena research and development groups. Prior to his current role, he was a senior advisor for the CTO at Nortel, and held other advanced technology roles during 13 years with the company, including director of broadband switching and optical Ethernet R&D. He served as Network Architect for the University of Toronto’s global bibliographic network service. He served as Chair of the Patronage Committee, IEEE International Conference of Communications 2012 (ICC 2012) Ottawa, and as member of the Organizing Committee ICC 2012. He is a frequent speaker at IEEE conferences and events, including the annual SuperComputing SC conference series sponsored jointly by IEEE and ACM. Originally trained in Electrical Engineering at Ryerson University in Toronto Ontario, and is a graduate of the Executive Management school at Stanford University in Palo Alto California. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee medal for his service to Canada.