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Don Mitchell
 
703.248.0123 		 Don Mitchell 

 Don Mitchell entered civilian federal service in 1970 as a management intern at the Department of Agriculture. In 1972, he moved to NSF, and began a career in contracting. In the mid-70s, he developed a system for motion picture production which was adopted in 1977 for government-wide use, pioneered the use of support contracting (before) and cooperative agreements (after) the inception of the Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act and managed the first civilian agency SBIR solicitation, as well as the first procurement which put a microcomputer on the desk of every employee in a federal agency. In 1987, he left NSF's Division of Grants and Contracts to join the newly formed division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure (NCRI) shortly before the beginning of the NSFNET Program.

After joining NCRI in 1987, he applied the experience gained from his previous activities to the networking infrastructure programs in that organization. His personal experience includes broad involvement in the programs and projects of that activity (which many credit with changing data networking from an arcane technology used by a small research community to the global Internet we know today). He is also coauthor, with Kimberley Claffy and Scott Bradner, of "In whose domain:name service in adolescence", which may be found at http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/iip/cai/bradner.html.

In addition to his role in NSFs major infrastructure activities, he was personally responsible for the Global Schoolhouse Project, Cornell University's (CU-SeeMe) Conferencing Software development and Cells-in-Frames projects, the InterNIC, the Internet Scout Project (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu), Dave Hughes Wireless Field tests (http://wireless.oldcolo.com), the National Laboratory for Applied Networking Research (http://www.nlanr.net), the Internet Caching Project (http://ircache.nlanr.net), the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (http://www/caida.org), the National Center for Data Mining (http://www.ncdm.uic.edu),the very high performance Backbone Network Service (http://www.vbns.net) and the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (http://hpwren.ucsd.edu).

During the period from June 1, 2000 through December 32, 2002, he served on an IPA assignment to the National Computational Science Alliance as Visiting Associate Director for Strategic Collaborations. Located at ACCESS (http://calder.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ACCESS), in Arlington, Virginia, he was instrumental in moving the US-Russian High Performance Network project to NCSA and establishing a formal partnership agreement with the Kurchatov Institute (the premier research institution in Russia). He was also actively involved in the development of the Multi-Sector crisis Management Consortium (http://www.mscmc.org).

Don retired from NSF in January 2002 and enjoys fishing and reading. He remains active in projects involving networking, wireless systems for field science, and education and has recently joined the Board of the Global SchoolNet Foundation.