IT Professionals Forum: new president, new board member

The IT Professionals Forum Board of Directors has elected Steve Harper as new board president, and the larger ITP community has elected Dan Clawson as its new board member.

The board consists of six elected members. In addition to Harper and Clawson are Angel Warkentin, Holly Christmas, Heather Bennett, and Doug Ressler. Elections are held each April, and board terms are two years.

Harper steps in for Ressler, two-term board president. Though his presidency term has elapsed, Ressler has one year remaining in his service as a board member. 

"It has indeed been a wonderful pleasure," Ressler said as he announced Harper's new role at the June 6 IT Professionals Forum. "This IT Professionals group is a great group of people, and I feel very privileged to serve on the board."

Said Harper, "I hope I can fill the large shoes that Doug leaves behind."

Clawson takes over the position vacated by Jeff Folsom, who stepped down after fulfilling his term.

Steve Harper – Center for High Performance Computing

Harper, CHPC systems administrator, has served on the board since 2015. He brings a wealth of IT experience to his role. After graduating from the U with a computer science degree, he worked for Marriott Library until 2005 when he accepted a position within CHPC, where he's been ever since. Harper has spent considerable time on CHPC's virtualization effort and protected environment for university researchers and staff working with protected health information (PHI). His areas of expertise include VMware, Perl, MySQL, Apache/Tomcat, LDAP, Atlassian Suite, and DNS.

Dan Clawson – Department of Family & Preventive Medicine

Clawson, IT project manager in the School of Medicine's Department of Family & Preventive Medicine, started at the university in 2000, working with large Unix systems for hosting websites, email, and database systems, according to his School of Medicine bio. He currently oversees technology associated with the expansion of the Physician Assistant Studies Program to St. George, among other things.

"We're doing a lot of fun things, and I enjoy it," Clawson said at the May 2 IT Professionals Forum.

Ressler, in turn, welcomed Clawson to the board.

"Dan, we appreciate your willingness to serve," Ressler said. "I can’t tell you how hard [board members] work. ... We have a huge mix of people from all over campus, and one of our roles is to disseminate information so that you're all informed."

 

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