Community News In Memory

The GÉANT Community pays tribute to Howard Davies

It is with a heavy heart that we let you know that Howard Davies, joint General Manager of DANTE between 1993 and 2001, passed away last week. Our thoughts are with his wife, Judy and their children and grandchildren.

Howard was a founding father of today’s pan-European GÉANT network for research and education. He acted as Director of the Interim COSINE Project Management Unit from 1989 to 1991 and from 1992 to 1994, he was Vice-President of RARE.

As joint General Manager of DANTE, Howard played a prominent role in the implementation of an increasingly powerful data-communications infrastructure to support network-based services for research and education. Before Howard retired at the end of 2001, he saw the launch into production of the GÉANT network. During his retirement, he worked with Beatrice Bressan of CERN on editing “A History of International Research Networking – The People who Made it Happen”, thus leaving the GÉANT community with our founding history.

Howard was committed to the research and education networking community and instrumental to interconnecting first the HEP community and later on the national research and education networks in Europe and beyond. Today, the GÉANT network interconnects over 110 countries world-wide, with millions of scientists and students using our services every day. As always, we are standing on the shoulders of giants and Howard was one of our giants.

We miss him and will continue to honour his legacy.

 

 

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