IT Professionals Forum welcomes new members, president

The IT Professionals Forum Board of Directors recently welcomed three new and two returning board members and a new president. The nomination and election process is held each April, and board terms are one or two years.

Nick Forbes, Jeff Jonsson, Randon Reed, James Reynolds, and Jon Rusho were chosen to serve on the board by members of the IT Pros Forum. Jonsson and Rusho are returning for their second terms, with Jonsson elected as the 2023-2025 board president. Cassandra Van Buren, director for UIT Strategic Communication, serves as UIT liaison to the board.

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Jeff Jonsson, IT Pros president, Marriott Library

Jonsson has been with Marriott Library for 31 years. He started his career at the U as a part-time weekend computer operator while earning his Bachelor of Arts in film/video/cinema studies. Jonsson performed a variety of jobs in systems administration after the university phased out its IBM mainframe.

In 2001, he moved into the library digitization group and became the sole sysadmin for a digital asset management system known as CONTENTdm, helping build the library's digital collections, utahdigitalnewspapers.com, and the Mountain West Digital Library. Since 2007, he works in general system administration, where he handles  VMware infrastructure, Windows and Linux guest administration, EMC SAN administration, a Qumulo storage cluster, a Rosetta archival digital asset management system, and a sizeable Commvault backup infrastructure.

In his spare time, Jonsson enjoys taking his wife, two daughters, and dog into the woods or desert with a pop-up camper to relax in the outdoors.

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Nick Forbes, Seismograph Stations

Forbes was born and raised in Carson City, Nevada, where he participated in web design and IT competitions through SkillsUSA. He received a scholarship to the University of Utah, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in geophysics while pursuing research characterizing seismic signals of mass wasting events in southern Utah following the 2017 Brian Head wildfire. During his undergraduate studies, Forbes worked as a rock and ice climbing guide and wilderness medicine instructor for Mountain Education & Development LLC, as well as a seismic analyst for the University of Utah Seismograph Stations.

Forbes is currently pursuing a Master of Science in seismology at the U, researching earthquake swarms occurring beneath Yellowstone Lake. He currently works as a seismic network engineer for the U of U Seismograph Stations, where he combines his outdoor experience with the technical side of physical earth sciences. In his spare time, you can catch Forbes fly-fishing, mountain biking, and exploring the Intermountain West.

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Jon Rusho, College of Mines and Earth Sciences

Rusho first started playing with computers in grade school, with an Apple II and TRS-80, and the occasional field trip to the U to play games on printing terminals, but it wasn't until high school that he started working with Unix, which would become a central part of his career.

Rusho’s first computer job was stringing network and cable and serial lines in the university’s Department of Chemistry. After a short diversion to earn a master's degree in computational chemistry, he returned to the U to manage the department’s network and computers.

During the dotcom boom, Rusho worked with Excite@Home as a Unix administrator, but after a few other IT adventures, he came back to the U to help manage the earthquake monitoring networks for the State of Utah and Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

Rusho is a certified scuba instructor and scuba instructor trainer, and works with Dive Utah in Holladay. He also earned his amateur radio license and helped form a group of operators to help the U's emergency management team with communications in emergencies. 
Rusho currently serves on the  IT Architecture and New Technology Committee (ANTC), College of Mines & Earth Sciences (CMES) IT committee, and the CMES Safety committee.

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Randon Reed, Utah Telehealth and Education Network

Reed began working in IT in the mid-1990s. His first IT job was tech support for a dial-up internet service provider. He then went to work for a startup software company which he helped build a product purchased by Apple. When his position was being moved to California, he went to work as an IT contractor at Hill Air Force Base (AFB), starting at the Help Desk for the F-16 group, but quickly working his way to the role of system administrator. Reed was able to progress to a domain administrator of the entire base but spent the last few years as a program manager, where he oversaw the day-to-day operations of his company’s contract with the U.S. Air Force and supervised the employees on that contract.

Reed left Hill AFB after 12 years to take a more stable position as the IT manager of a local school district. In July 2018, he found his way to the Utah Telehealth and Education Network (UETN) and the University of Utah where he is currently the building IT manager at the Eccles Broadcast Center and a system administrator for UETN.

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James Reynolds, School of Biological Sciences

Reynolds’ first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. In 1999, he earned a Bachelor of Music from the U’s School of Music and then became a Macintosh administrator for the College of Fine Arts. In 2000, James transferred to Marriott Library, where he helped administer Macintosh computers for students and staff.

Throughout this period, James participated in the Mac OS X Labs and MacEnterprise organizations, dedicated to advancing the adoption of Mac OS X. This involvement provided him with invaluable opportunities to attend dozens of conferences and present at several, including Apple’s WWDC 2005, where he discussed scripting and deployment methodologies.

In 2014, Reynolds transferred to the School of Biological Sciences, where he manages Mac, Linux, VMware, and some Windows infrastructure supporting workstations, servers, and networking for staff, faculty, and students.

 

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