The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives today announced that Stanford University’s Bill Clebsch would be assuming the role of Chair of the CENIC Board of Directors. He will begin his duties as of January 1, 2013. Clebsch succeeds the University of California’s Chief Information Officer David Ernst, who has served as Board Chair since 2008.

CENIC is a non-profit corporation created in 1996 by California’s research and education community in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. Members of CENIC include the California K-12 system, all 112 campuses of California's Community Colleges, all 23 campuses of the California State University, all 10 campuses of the University of California, and prestigious private universities including Caltech, USC, Stanford, and others.

CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities. CalREN consists of a 3,000-mile fiber-optic CENIC-operated backbone to which schools and other institutions in all 58 of California's counties connect via leased circuits obtained from telecom carriers or via CENIC owned fiber-optic cable.

With CalREN connecting California’s research and educational institutions, high-performance collaboration can take place in a fraction of a second -- enabling advanced research and collaboration on a global scale thanks to CalREN's connections to similar networks around the world.

Bill Clebsch is the Associate Vice President for IT Services at Stanford. He holds university-wide responsibility for Stanford’s data center planning and operations; research computing; network and communication services; infrastructure applications; desktop and mobility support; call center services; and help desk support. Bill came to Stanford in 1986 for the project that implemented the campus-wide voice and data network. After holding several positions of increasing responsibility in IT, Bill assumed the leadership role for the central IT organization in 2006. He was promoted to Associate Vice President in 2009.

Bill has been involved with CENIC since its inception. He helped develop the early financial models for funding CENIC, and served on the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) in the 1990s. He has been a member of the CENIC Board for four years, and served as a representative on the Internet2 Committee on funding U.S. UCAN.

“CENIC and indeed the global research and education network community is moving into a new era of ultra-high-performance and above-the-network services, and the leadership and experience that Bill offers will be absolutely invaluable in assuring that California maintains and builds on its current position as a global innovator,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “Thanks as well to the foundation laid during the past four years by David Ernst and by current and continuing Vice Chair Patrick Perry of California’s Community Colleges, CENIC and the communities we serve are sure to benefit from Bill’s expertise.”

About CENIC

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged. For more information, please visit http://www.cenic.org/.