Dennis Jennings
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| Country: | Ireland |
| LinkedIn: |  [dennis-jennings/0/86/12a Dennis Jennings]
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Work
Dr. Dennis Jennings has a wide and varied career.
It has spanned venture capital, where he is the co-founder of 4th Level Ventures (2002 to present) - an Irish Venture Capital company whose primary objective is to invest in companies commercialising the business opportunities that arise from university research in Ireland (http://www.4lv.ie). He is also an "Angel" investor, investing in early stage technology companies.[1]
In terms of board membership, he is currently chairman and/or board member of a small number of small technology companies, and has a wide experience of the issues relating to the start-up, funding, supervision and governance, and survival of early stage technology companies.
In regard to university/research IT management, Dr Jennings was the director of University College Dublin (UCD — http://www.ucd.ie) Computing Services from 1977 to 1999, where he was responsible for the university IT infrastructure and a staff of over 90 people. He was interim President of the Consortium for Scientific Computing at the John von Neumann Centre (JvNC) in Princeton, New Jersey, responsible for the start-up of the supercomputer centre (1986, on leave from UCD). He is currently Chairman of the Oversight Board of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC – http://www.ichec.ie).
He is also an Internet pioneer, having been responsible for the decisions that created NSFNET (1985/86) - the network that became the Internet - while working for the US Federal Government (on leave from UCD). He was actively involved in the start-up of research networks in the Europe (EARN - President; Ebone - Board member) and Ireland (HEAnet - initial proposal and later Board member. http://www.heanet.ie). He chaired the Board and General Assembly of the Council for European Top level domain Registries (CENTR) from 1999 to early 2001 - http://www.centr.org - and was actively involved in the start-up of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - www.icann.org - during that period.[2]
Career History
- Board Observer at Redmere
- Member of the Board at ICANN
- Investor at Flint Telecom[3]
Education
Dr. Jennings holds a 1st Class honours physics BSc degree from University College Dublin (1967), and a PhD degree obtained for a search for high-energy gamma radiation from pulsars (neutron stars) (1972). He is an opera and classical music enthusiast, and is the chairman of the UCD Choral Scholars Board of Management.[4]