What is your first U of A memory?
My first memory was participating in the Edmonton Journal Indoor Games, back in the mid-90s when I was in elementary. It was hosted at the Butterdome and I ran the 200-metre and 400-metre events. I remember being incredibly nervous but once the race started, it all went away.
What’s something your coworkers don’t know about you?
I lived in East Africa for a year. My dad took a sabbatical and moved our family to Nairobi, Kenya. While there, I did an entire year of high school and was lucky to experience many different cultural aspects of the country.
If you were enrolling in one course, program or degree right now, what would it be?
Culinary arts! I like food, but unfortunately can’t eat much of it due to health reasons. It would be entertaining to learn both its art and science, enabling me to be a bit more creative in the kitchen.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
Two-way tie between Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek or Albus Dumbledore from Harry Potter. I encountered both at a very young age and decades later, to me, they still set the bar for respected leaders. Both characters wield exceptional influence and power but do so in a compassionate, empathetic and caring manner that many of us can learn from.
If you could see any live performance tomorrow, what would it be?
I would love to see the Broadway musical Wicked. My wife and I have seen many musicals over the years but this one continues to escape us. The touring version was scheduled to come to Edmonton in 2020 but it was canceled because of COVID. That, or Avril Lavigne. She was here a few months ago and I knew every word to every line of every song. My wife has some videos of me singing along rather loudly (which are probably best kept hidden).
What advice would you give your 18-year-old self?
“In two years from now, your cousin Julie is going to ask if you want to meet her friend Vanessa. Be sure to say yes, because this is how you meet your wife.”
What’s one thing you can’t live without?
LEGO! Along with cybersecurity, it’s a second passion. I spend much of my time in front of computers, so LEGO allows for a complete escape from the digital world. Every year I tell myself I’ll buy less LEGO, but the opposite tends to happen. Our kids, however, are more than happy with that.
What three words describe your U of A experience?
Growth, learning, relationships.
Do you have any upcoming projects or initiatives you are looking forward to at work?
Every winter semester I spend two months teaching an advanced network security course in our master of science in Internetworking (MINT) program. The course teaches graduate students cybersecurity as it applies to information moving between systems connected by large, global, communication networks. I absolutely love doing this as I get to directly interact with our students, guide some of their research capstones and apply my professional knowledge in a way that is very different from my day-to-day work.
Speaking of day-to-day, cybersecurity is primarily a business issue tied to risk management instead of being just a technology issue tied to computers. It’s been great seeing this message expand and how far and wide IST is now involved throughout the university as it relates to protecting our information. In the immediate future, we’ll be seeking community feedback as we rewrite our policies for IT and cybersecurity, while also getting ready to deploy a very large AI-infrastructure cluster, which will ensure organizations like the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) continue to be world-class leaders.
