Since 1998, Tim Lance has served as President and Chairman of NYSERNet, the New York State Education and Research Network. During his tenure, NYSERNet deployed a statewide research network backbone, connecting initially to vBNS, and then to Abilene in New York City and Buffalo. That research backbone was a crucial tool in the rapid restoration of commodity Internet service in the hours and days after 9/11. Under his leadership, over the last four years NYSERNet moved from dependence on carrier circuits to control of transport, beginning with a still expanding fiber deployment for the R&E, medical, and cultural communities in New York City, and then a statewide DWDM optical infrastructure. NYSERNet created a carrier-neutral collocation facility at 32 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, home of MANLAN and peering point for CA*net, GÉANT, SURFNET and other national and international networks, and soon home to nodes for NLR and HOPI. He is an active participant in the Quilt, and authored a vision paper for the network for EDUCAUSE’s Broadband Policy Group.
Dr. Lance also chairs the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University at Albany, where he holds the rank of Distinguished Service Professor. He has served as the campus CIO and been active in developing campus technology, including creation of the New York Journal of Mathematics with colleague Mark Steinberger. In addition to research grants, as chair he has secured a decade of GAANN federal grants for the doctoral program, garnered corporate support for faculty lines, ran a multi-year outreach collaboration with the Albany schools, and now a “No Child Left Behind” grant for teachers in area schools. Much of Dr. Lance’s research has been in geometric topology (smooth structures on manifolds and the underlying homotopy theory) and more recently in complex analysis (structure of spaces of holomorphic functions using tools from algebra and topology). He holds a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University.