By the end of this month, a number of valued OIT employees will retire with a combined total of 140 years of service! We thank them for their numerous contributions and accomplishments over the years and wish them success and happiness as they embark on a new chapter. Below are some of OIT's retirees.
Donnie Emeson
Donnie Emeson will retire on June 30 after 24 years of service. He started his CU journey as a student employee under Mike Carter. After graduating from CU Boulder with a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese, Donnie worked as a professional gambler, ski glove manufacturer, stockbroker and dealing cards in a casino. While dealing cards at the casino, Donnie ran into Mike Carter who asked him to come back to CU Boulder to work for him as a UNIX systems admin. Over the course of his CU Boulder career, Donnie held a number of roles including student computing adviser, student computing adviser manager, and storage manager.
One of his most memorable CU stories came on the heels of his transfer of the IdentiKey service, which he ran for almost 14 years, to the newly formed Identity Access Management (IAM) team. Shortly following the transfer, OIT surveyed the campus about its services and single identity was voted the number one service OIT provided to campus.
Joel Frahm
Joel Frahm, who will retire on June 30 after 29 years of service, started off his CU Boulder career as an OIT student employee in various roles including picking up and delivering computers for repair as well as delivering films, videos and video monitors to classrooms. At the time, some of the old buildings did not have elevators so lugging a 27" CRT up 3 flights of stairs was not uncommon.
Upon graduation, Joel was hired as a full-time JILA computing and electronics tech in January 1992. At the time, JILA did their own network support including wiring, managing layer-3 switches and supporting 3 subnets and about 1000 hosts. In 2001, he was promoted to director of computing and electronics.
In 2009-2010 the Research Computing (RC) team was forming and Joel was asked to help centralize IT support for research. Within months, a skeleton crew in RC stood up a VMWare cluster and a research computing 10Gbps network between OIT, on-campus labs, and institutes. Joel is currently working as a senior consultant for RC users.
Kevin Mayer
Kevin Mayer will retire from CU Boulder on June 30 after 15 years of service. He has been a software engineer and SQL developer for OIT through the course of various organizational changes, initially working for Administrative Information Systems (AIS), then Development & Integration, and lastly the Software Development team under Service Engineering.
He has been a key contributor to numerous development efforts including the famous (or perhaps infamous) “Registry Jobstream”, the core collection of processes for the creation of digital identities and IdentiKey accounts at CU Boulder, provisioning applications for several learning management systems, development in support of student and staff portals, including being dedicated to the Buff Portal effort, and many more applications to support various IT business needs of the campus.
CU is a huge part of his family. Not only did Kevin graduate from CU, but so did his father, brother, two uncles, and a cousin. “I lost a job during Colorado's oil bust and used to ponder how lucky people who worked at CU were when I'd come to use the CU Career Center. Later on in life, God gave me the opportunity to work here with Kris Easter, Gary Pollock, Burton Fox, Andy Marangakis, and Dave Goldhammer,” said Kevin.
Kevin plans to return as a working retiree working part-time for Identity & Access Management and also develop his family’s motorcycle business. In July, he plans to “take a scoot down to Mexico on my Harley to see what's up at the border.”
Eric Sherrill
Eric Sherrill, who will retire on July 1 with over 20 years of service, started his CU Boulder career working at Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) after graduating from the Department of East Asian Languages with a Master of Arts in Japanese Literature. He began working for OIT, formerly known as ITS, as a technician for classroom technology as a replacement for Burt Rubenowitz, the outgoing classroom technology engineer. Eric made his home in OIT and contributed to the successful operation that we have now. Over the years, he has been an integral part of the transformation from traditional AV systems, i.e., overhead projector and slide projectors, to the current digital systems including AV over IP, ultraHD and large format LCD displays and laser projectors. He has been constantly learning as technology changed which kept him on his toes!
Eric has many interests such as road and mountain biking, hiking, skiing, and music interests such as guitar and Taiko drumming. His dedication to CU is evident in all the times he worked overnight, and on Sundays, in order to get classrooms ready before school started. He may know just about everyone on campus and has always been an outstanding guy to work with. His plans after retirement are to continue all of his interests noted above as well as traveling and spending his free time improving his photography skills.
Mark Werner
Mark Werner plans to retire on June 4 with almost 25 years of service to CU, 22 of those with OIT. Throughout his career, he has held a number of positions including assistant professor at CU Denver in the Communication Department, distributed academic and campus technology coordinator, manager of instructional technology support services, associate director of academic technology research, associate director of academic technology strategy and support and is currently associate director of academic technology learning design.
Mark has many fond memories of the work he’s done over the years, but some of the most notable include the collaboration of his team with Chris Koehler to deliver Pathway to Space, CU’s first space show, and the evolution of Kubi Remote Presence Technology from an idea to funding to pilot to an OIT service offering; but his most notable success is the people he was able to bring in to OIT and guide including, Doris Cheung, Mark Gammon, Aisha Jackson, Amanda McAndrew, Jacie Moriyama, Viktoriya Oliynyk, Sandra Sawaya, Shane Schwikert, Randy Shioshita, and Clara Smith. He also hired Solveig Delabroye, manager of the Technology Copilots as a graduate assistant. Many others have since retired or left CU. Mark doesn’t intend on fully retiring, he’ll unplug for a bit and continue work as a user experience researcher.
