NLR Management
Gwendolyn (Wendy) Huntoon
Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Wendy Huntoon is the Acting CEO and CTO for NLR, with responsibility for setting overall business and technology strategy for the organization. She is also the Vice Chair of NLR's Board of Directors.
In her role as CTO, Huntoon oversees NLR's Engineering and Operations function, which includes a distributed Network Operations Center (NOC) for Layer 1, 2 and 3 services, and NLR Engineering and Field Services. Also reporting to Huntoon is NLR's Experiments Support Services team, which provides end-to-end support for the research community's use of NLR.
Huntoon concurrently serves as Director of Networking at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) where she directs the networking resource group, which carries out advanced research and provides consulting and training to universities and research centers nationwide. Her responsibilities also include the management and direction of the Pittsburgh Gigapop, a high-speed network aggregation point that provides advanced network services to Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Huntoon holds a B.A. in Math and History from Bowdoin College and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University.
Kurt A. Snodgrass, Chief Administrative and Financial Officer
Kurt Snodgrass is the Chief Administrative and Financial Officer for National LambdaRail (NLR). In this capacity he oversees all administrative and financial functions for NLR, including business development, human resources, member relations, accounting, contracts, marketing and communications.
Prior to joining NLR in May 2010, Snodgrass served as Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Telecommunications for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. He was responsible for operations and budgets of the agency's Information Technology divisions at the State Regents as well as the Oklahoma Guaranteed Student Loan Program. In addition, he served as Chief Operating Officer for OneNet, Oklahoma's official telecommunications network for education and government.
From 2004 to 2010 Snodgrass was Oklahoma's representative on the NLR Board of Directors and from 2005 until 2009 he served on Sprint's Higher Education Advisory Board.
Snodgrass holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Oklahoma as well as a Master of Science Degree from Oklahoma State University – emphasizing curriculum development and information communication technologies.
Grover Browning, Director of Engineering and Operations
Grover Browning, Director of Engineering and Operations for National LambdaRail (NLR), has extensive experience designing and deploying next-generation networks.
In his current role he oversees all technical operations for NLR under a contract with Indiana University (IU), where Browning concurrently serves as Manager, National Optical Infrastructures. Browning's responsibilities include managing NLR's distributed Network Operations Center (NOC) Services, including the Service Desk, Layer 1 NOC, Layer 2/3 NOC, NLR Engineering and Field Services; planning and managing the NLR infrastructure; managing NLR's technical and operational relationships as well as overall planning and design for evolving the NLR infrastructure.
In the over three years Browning has worked with NLR, he was instrumental is setting up NLR's Layer 2 (FrameNet) and Layer 3 (PacketNet) networks, and has deployed over 12,000 miles of optical networking equipment encompassing 250 locations, 31 add/drops locations, and $100M in equipment. This includes the dark build of the NLR Phase2/southern footprint and the replacement of the lit NLR Phase1/Northern footprint on a particularly aggressive schedule with minimal customer impact.
Before NLR, Browning's experience included designing and deploying the Indiana state optical network, iLight. He also deployed the first-generation Internet2 Abilene routers as well as designed and deployed the second-generation Internet2 Abilene routed network.
Browning has a B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from Indiana University.