Randy Carpenter

GVU Impact Award Winner
Randy Carpenter was honored for his outstanding technical support of GVU. Carpenter was hired as GVU’s first full-time lab manager in 1992. He went on to become a central figure in GVU’s continued success for many years.

When Carpenter arrived at GVU, the disjointed nature of the program posed many technological and infrastructural problems. Recall that the GVU Center had been formed through a combination of efforts by diverse parties drawing faculty from different parts of campus. This diversity created interdisciplinary challenges for things like network logins, servers, and shared lab areas.

“Being the GVU lab manager was the most exciting time of my career. It was truly an enlightening period for me. The most enjoyable aspect was the overall, interdisciplinary community spirit of the center which was created largely by Dr. Foley’s visionary leadership. Dr. Foley was recruited to glue the people together and foster overall community. I provided the primary point of contact for technical challenges regarding the shared lab infrastructure.”

“Advancing the technical infrastructure of the GVU Center required that I coordinate diverse interests that were not always in alignment. This resulted in close collaboration with the College of Computing’s IT group, primarily David Leonard and Dan Forsyth as well as the OIT Scientific Visualization Lab led by Bill Ribarsky,” said Carpenter.

One episode representative of his early days in GVU was when he turned a mainframe storage room into a working lab space. The space available was a vacated raised-floor machine room, and transforming it into an open, shared, interdisciplinary research lab required gutting the rooms massive hardware as well altering the cooling system so that students would not have to wear jackets and scarves to work.

In later years, he joined the College of Computing’s IT group, but continued to mentor new GVU lab managers. As GVU grew, the large shared lab model morphed into more focused labs and the management of strategic technology has changed. Currently Carpenter works closely with these labs and advises multiple GVU technology managers.

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