At the November GÉANT General Assembly (GA) meeting, our members voted for four open GÉANT Board Member positions. The open positions are a result of four Board Members – Paul Feldman, Ana Tavares Pinto, Federico Ruggieri, and Floor Jas each reaching the end of their term. On behalf of the GÉANT community we would like to express our sincere thanks for their endless efforts and excellent service.
New Board Members
We are pleased to now announce the following Members have been elected to the GÉANT Board of Directors following the voting process:
- Claudio Allocchio – elected for 3-year term
- Ronan Byrne – elected for 3-year term
- Floor Jas – re-elected for 3-year term
- Cezary Mazurek – elected for 3-year term
Claudio Allocchio
Claudio is one of the founding members of GARR, and since 1989 has acted as Senior Technical Officer of the Application Services, Middleware, Security, Policy, and International Relations. He is also GARR’s Chief Information Security Officer. Since 2002 his role is Senior Manager and Advisor, directly assisting the GARR Director in the management of the organisation and a member of the GARR Exec Team.
He has also been extensively involved throughout the development of the community, with a leadership role in TERENA and as part of the team that created the bylaws of the GÉANT Association. He was awarded the Vietsch Foundation Medal of Honour for his career, and in 2020 and 2023 received the RedCLARA ‘e-Culture Award’ for his contribution in Latin America to blend network technologies and the arts.
Since 2020 Claudio has been chair of the GÉANT Community Committee, incorporating the Community Programme, Task Forces and Special Interest Groups, and the Innovation Programme.
Ronan Byrne
Appointed CEO in 2021, and before that CTO in 2011, Ronan’s career at HEAnet goes back to 2004 and in that time, he has driven many landmark programmes including the Schools Broadband Network that connects Ireland’s 4,000 schools, the Edugate national federation service, the establishment of an ICT procurement team that delivers over €7m savings annually, and the upgrade of the HEAnet national backbone to 100Gbps capacity.
Ronan has served on GÉANT’s Network Infrastructure Advisory Committee (NIAC) since 2019, on the EOSC Governance Board during 2019-2020, and in 2021 he served a one-year term on the inaugural Board of the EOSC Association.
Floor Jas
Floor has over 25 years of experience within SURF, in different roles and departments. She has been interim CTO and CEO for SURFnet. Since the end of 2020, Floor is Head of SURF’s Network, Trust & Security department.
Floor strongly believes in international collaboration and encourages this within her teams. Her department has been the birthplace for recent initiatives and services such as eduVPN, InAcademia, eduTEAMS and CLAW.
Floor has been a member of GÉANT’s Board of Directors since November 2020, and has chaired the Audit and Risk Advisory Committee (ARAC) since 2021. She is also a member of the Netherlands Standardisation Forum.
Cezary Mazurek
CEO of PSNC since 2019 and Deputy CEO two years before that, Cezary has been associated with PSNC since its very beginning in 1993 with a variety of roles including Director of the Network Services Division (since 2013) and Head of the Network Services Department (since 1996). Throughout this time, his primary goal was to boost innovation in national and European e-infrastructure through R&D of ICT technologies and their application for the digital transformation of science, industry, and society.
Active in the NREN community for over 20 years and contributing to GÉANT projects since 2009 as both Work Package Leader and a member of the GÉANT Programme Planning Committee (GPPC), Cezary has extensive experience of GÉANT and its activities, as well as holding several other roles in related projects.
GÉANT Board of Directors
The three new (and one re-elected) Board Members join existing Board Members:
- Gilles Massen (Chair of the Board)
- Lars Fischer
- Heidi Fraser-Krauss
- George Konnis
- János Mohácsi
The GA is GÉANT’s highest governing body, in which representatives of its member organisations meet at least three times a year and is also responsible for electing members to the GÉANT Board of Directors.
