Blank joins Internet2 board

Chancellor Rebecca Blank has been elected to the Internet2 Board of Trustees, a panel comprising university presidents, chief information officers, network and discipline researchers, and industry partners.

Internet2 provides a technologically advanced, high-speed network linking U.S. higher education institutions to each other, and to federal agencies, laboratories and to the research arms of major industry collaborators. Internet2 connects to other international research and education networks to create a global high-speed, high quality of service network.

“I look forward to serving on a board that has such a wide impact on the future of higher education,” Blank says. “As a founding member of Internet2, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has continuously contributed to the ongoing development and expansion of the critical services offered by Internet2. It is essential technology to support science at research universities.”

Examples of UW uses of the Internet2 network include:

• Internet2 provides the high-speed network that is used to support the Open Science Grid (OSG) computation resources across the U.S. Computer science Professor Miron Livny led the creation of the OSG and the Center for High Throughput Computing at UW–Madison, which provides the computation services for the Grid.
• Internet2 provides network connectivity to international research and education networks that link UW instruments, facilities and researchers with off-campus collaborators. Examples include UW’s NSF-funded IceCube neutrino detection observatory, CMS and ATLAS High Energy Physics projects at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
• Internet2 recently began providing software services that run on the Internet2 backbone, including the highly utilized Box cloud document storage service used by UW faculty, staff and students.

Trustees are elected or appointed for three-year terms and serve as the governance of the organization, providing strategic direction, leadership and fiscal oversight. Previous UW–Madison trustee members include former Chancellor David Ward and computer sciences emeritus Professor Larry Landweber.