Photo of David Lassner

David Lassner
Chief Information Officer
University of Hawaii

David Lassner serves as the University of Hawaii's first Chief Information Officer. In that capacity he has been responsible for designing, implementing and directing a new integrated organization to support academic computing, administrative computing, distributed learning technologies and voice, data and video telecommunications. Under his leadership, Information Technology Services (ITS) provides campuswide technology support for the Hawaii's flagship research university, UH-Manoa, as well as addresses the statewide needs of the University of Hawaii System which is comprised of 10 campuses and 5 education centers on 6 islands. 

David is also a member of the University's Cooperating Graduate Faculty and has taught, both in-person and on-line, in the UH Department of Information & Computer Science, the College of Business Administration, the School of Communication and the College of Education as well as at Roosevelt University. David has been at the University of Hawaii since 1977, holding both technical and management positions in instructional technology, computing support, networking, and distance education.  Prior to that, David worked his way through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a student programmer on courseware development teams working with the PLATO system at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory.

David is active in a wide variety of local, national and international activities relating to information technologies. He represents Hawaii in the Internet2 project and has been elected to chair Internet2 Applications Strategy Council and serve on the Internet2 Board of Trustees. David serves on the Board of the Pacific Northwest Gigapop and is  a founding Board member of the Internet Equal Educational Access Foundation (IEEAF), which acquires international fiber optic assets in support of education and research.  He was a founder of the Hawaii Internet Exchange, Hawaii's first neutral public/private peering facility, and is a past-chair of the Hawaii Intranet Consortium which provides Internet linkages and peering among federal and state facilities in Hawaii. David has coordinated a number of education projects for the Internet Society internationally and is active in EDUCAUSE, where he initiated and led several constituent groups, has served on and chaired several committees and was a member of the national faculty of the EDUCAUSE Management Institute.  He currently serves on the faculty of the CAUDIT-EDUCAUSE Management Institute serving Australia and New Zealand.

David serves on the founding Board for Kuali, the first community/open source  project in higher education to address administrative information systems.  He serves on and Chairs the Board of Governors of the Pacific Telecommunications Council and is a founding Steering Committee member and two-time Past-Chair of WICHE's Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, which awarded him the 2000 Richard Jonsen Award for service to educational telecommunications. David has attracted, hosted and/or chaired a number of international technology meetings in Hawaii including INET95, Webnet99, GOIN99, Internet2/APAN 2001 and 2004 (Techs in Paradise), WWW2002, EdMedia 2003 and PTC2005.  He has been appointed by two Governors and confirmed by the State Senate to serve on the Board of Directors of Hawaii's High Technology Development Corporation, where he chairs the Federal Programs Committee.

David is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Maui High Performance Computing Center, a $181m 10-year contract to operate and manage a major supercomputer center for the U.S. government. He was also PI for the University's High Performance Connections grant, through which he established the first cooperative arrangement between a university and a federal network to bring Internet2 to a state, and was PI for the Hawaii Education and Research Network (HERN), Hawaii's 3-yr $2.1M NSF-sponsored Networking Infrastructure for Education demonstration project that focused on the transformation of K12 and higher education with networking technologies. David is the author of several book chapters, hosts a monthly television show on high technology in Hawaii, and is regularly invited to speak on a broad range of topics locally, nationally and internationally.

David earned his A.B. summa cum laude in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also earned an M.S. in Computer Science as a University Fellow. He spent a year as a Research Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu and earned a Ph.D. in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii.

David Lassner



University of Hawaii


+1 808 956-3501 (tel)

2532 Correa Rd


+1 808 956-5025 (fax)

Honolulu, HI 96822


 david@hawaii.edu

USA