Our Guest Speaker will be Lynn Sutherland VP VrSTORM Inc. Lynn has worked in information and communications technology for 25 years. After 22 years in the not-for-profit sector, including Department Head of Advanced Computing, Alberta Research Council, Vice President, iCORE, and President, Cybera, she is now Vice President of VrSTORM Inc., a startup company created to deploy Canada's first commercial cloud.

Lynn was a key member of the task force who prepared the policy report, Information and Communications Technology: A Strategy for Alberta, in 1998. which led to significant government investment in ICT education, research, infrastructure, and business growth. She has been involved in over 100 ICT research, development, and commercialization projects, including, analysis and visualization, intelligent monitoring and control systems, simulation and prediction, and the rollout of the Alberta provincial telehealth network.  She is on the board of directors of CANARIE, Canada's advanced research and innovation network, and The Alberta Science and Technology Leadership Foundation.

Bio bullets:

June 2009 - present: Vice President of VrSTORM - a startup company creating Canada's first commercial compute and data cloud
2007 - May 2009: President and CEO of Cybera Inc. - Alberta Cyberinfrastructure for Innovation - to provide support for academic and industry research and development using cyberinfrastructure.
1999 - 2007: Created a new informatics research funding organization, iCORE - Informatics Circle of Research Excellence - to recruit and fund world-class Information and Communications Technology researchers to the province of Alberta. Created successful programs for Research Chairs, Industry Chairs, Visiting Professors and Graduate Students.
1998: Coordinated the Alberta Science and Research Authority policy committee who developed the report: Information and Communications Technology: A Strategy for Alberta. This led to recommendations and significant actions in: Education; Research; Network Infrastructure and Business Support.
1985 - 1997: Grew an applied research department, Advanced Computing and Engineering, Alberta Research Council, from zero to over seventy employees, eventually becoming Department Head.
1982 - 84: Founding Chief Technical Officer for a spinout company for a Queen's University-developed parallel programming language.
1982: BSc. Mathematics and Computer Science; Queen's University.