Bill Sheffield Email Address

Network Communications Manager and Acting Manager of Enterprise Networks

$300,000 to the University of New Orleans in New Orleans, Louisiana, to support the implementation of the New Orleans Regional Innovation Alliance, a collaborative effort between universities, colleges, industry partners, and economic development organizations throughout southeastern Louisiana that will work to advance the region as an innovation engine. $1.5 million to STC.UNM inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, a nonprofit corporation on the University of New Mexico's (UNM) campus that works with researchers, scientists, and companies to help get technologies developed at UNM to market. The funds will help establish a new innovation center to anchor Innovate ABQ, a collaborative initiative to bring together the research powers of the state's flagship university and Albuquerque's entrepreneurial and established business community to create new companies, grow existing ones, and attract more out-of-state business. $300,000 to Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, to support the STAR Center for Materials and Life Sciences, which will work to strengthen materials and life sciences clusters by expanding capacity for industry interaction at the university, creating critical support services to grow an effective innovation environment, increasing support for student entrepreneurship activities, increasing participation in programs by underserved populations, and increasing awareness of programs to support startup/early stage companies to the Austin region. $300,000 to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, to build on the South Plains region's capability in wind and other renewable energy sources that increase innovation and entrepreneurship through technology commercialization. This project supports cross-disciplinary student teams performing hands-on analysis to identify technologies suitable for commercialization to increase the region's ability to leverage investments.

University of New Orleans— Network Communications Manager: Supervise and participate in the planning, installation, and maintenance of the campus network. I manage a team of seven employees that consists of Network Techs, a Senior Network Engineer, a Network Engineer, and Student Technicians. Currently, my team and I are working on an assignment in which we have been tasked with replacing our end-of-lifecycle network core equipment and redesigning the campus network. In addition, I'm currently making hands-on improvements to our campus fiber optic infrastructure by replacing patch connections with fusion splices to over 110 telecommunications rooms (MDFs, IDFs) at our university campus. ITC, a Microsoft Solutions Provider—Service Manager: Supervised a team of three technicians, negotiated hardware maintenance agreements, provided network, desktop, and application support. Responsible for providing hardware maintenance of servers, PCs, and peripherals. Halifax Engineering—Senior Field Engineer: Performed onsite PC and network maintenance for the Department of Defense, NASA, MMS, UNO, and many private agencies. I was a senior member of a support team that maintained systems categorized as launch-critical in the NASA Space Shuttle Program.