For promoting and supporting the extraordinary adoption by the CSUs of the CENIC AI Resource

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) is pleased to announce that Chief Infrastructure Officer Kendra Ard and Chief Information Officer Ed Clark of the California State University (CSU) Chancellor’s Chief Information Office will be recognized with the 2026 CENIC AIR Award for Engagement. The award will be presented at CENIC’s biennial conference “The Right Connection” to be held from March 31–April 1, 2026 in Monterey, CA.

When CENIC started working years ago with some of its members to launch the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR), it was clear that its ultimate success would be based on engaging a broad array of CSU faculty and students throughout California. Working with a range of disciplines among multiple CSU institutions has enabled CENIC AIR to deliver on its promise of spurring creativity and innovation across the CENIC higher education community.

Kendra Ard and Ed Clark have nurtured collaborations and training to support the intellectual contributions of faculty, staff, and students in both AI and high-performance computing. In addition to creating supportive environments, the proactive encouragement of faculty and student teams has led to exponential growth in the value and impact of CENIC AIR.

As faculty and researchers engaged, institutions recognized the need for more bandwidth. The Chancellor’s Office leadership was critically important to the work of CENIC engineering in standing up the first 800 Gbps circuit in California at San Diego State University (SDSU)—a landmark achievement for R&E networks.

CENIC currently counts 11 CSU campuses actively engaged with CENIC AIR, supporting over 300 individual faculty and their students in research, with thousands of students in class labs, and with other CSU campuses in various stages of planning and deployment.

Additionally, the success of CENIC AIR projects has inspired several California Community Colleges to join the initiative, greatly strengthening the state’s ability to develop the skilled, AI-enabled workforce needed to continue California’s technology and economic leadership into the future.

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