Gibson steps down

luke
7 May 2015

Dr Ian Gibson, the founding CEO of Intersect Australia, has stepped down after six and a half years in the role.

Chairman of the Intersect Board, Emeritus Professor Mark Wainwright AM, said, “Intersect has achieved an enormous amount in a short period of time, starting in 2008 and growing to be the largest eResearch services organisation in Australia today. None of this would have been possible without the strategically focussed leadership of Ian Gibson”.

Intersect built Australia’s leading eResearch engineering and services base. It then secured funding for and built peta-scale research storage and cloud computing infrastructure. It offers a full suite of products and services to support its members’ research endeavours. “On the back of these investments Ian built strategic partnerships and initiatives to deliver further benefits to university members. The new national medical data initiative, for instance, is a world first and stands to enable health and medical discoveries by sharing the datasets generated by dozens of universities, medical research institutes and state government health departments”, Professor Wainwright said.
Dr Gibson said, “This decision has not been made lightly but it is the right time for me to hand over the reins to the next generation of leadership to take Intersect to the next level”.
“I am extremely proud of what we have achieved at Intersect”, Dr Gibson said. “Intersect has delivered high quality services and a strong return-on-investment consistently for all members since
day one. More importantly, we have enabled many thousands of research outcomes across many disciplines. Intersect's twelve university members collectively contribute approximately 30% of
Australia’s university research output and 1.5% of the world’s. Intersect has made a difference”.
“I believe deeply that the undertaking of world-leading research – across almost any discipline – is increasingly dependent on having access to the best data analytics and informatics skills and
resources. Any organisation with global research ambitions needs to work out how they will achieve this” Dr Gibson said.
Intersect’s board has appointed Marc Bailey, currently Chief Operating Officer, to the position of CEO effective 1 May 2015.
“Marc and Ian have worked together as customer/partner and as colleagues for many years. Marc’s appointment positions Intersect strongly for its next phase of its development: providing operational excellence and researcher focus across new product and service offerings”, said Professor Mark
Wainwright.
Bailey joined Intersect as COO in 2014. An experienced software and networking technology manager, he was previously CIO at Macquarie University. In earlier CTO and CEO roles he informed governmental policy and information management at regional, state and federal levels in Australia and New Zealand, as well as whole-of-government change management in the Scottish Government and Welsh Assembly, and standards development for the European Union.
Dr Gibson will remain involved with Intersect in a consulting role for strategic projects. 

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