Paul Okanda graduated with a First Class Honors degree in Computer Science and worked at Procter & Gamble as a Systems Analyst before he became the Manager, Applications at the company. He then left for the United Kingdom (UK) where he graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications in 2006. He worked as a Researcher on a number of European Union (EU) funded research projects involving a number of Universities and industrial players all over Europe. Paul was a member of Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications Next Generation Middleware Group (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/mpg/reflection/) for over six years after which he joined InfoLab21’s Knowledge Business Centre (KBC) as Head of the InfoLab21 Student Academy (ISA - http://www.infolab21.org.uk/people/student_academy/). He led ISA’s core activity which involved Information & Communications Technology Transfer and Knowledge Exchange initiatives between Lancaster University’s InfoLab21 and industry.

Paul has done consultancy and supervised the delivery of IT projects by PhD, MSc and UG students to over 150 businesses over the years. He has also provided academic supervision to a number of PhD students pursuing Lancaster University’s flagship HighWire PhD program (www.highwire.lancs.ac.uk) in the Doctoral Training Centre (DTC).

Paul has been a Program Committee member of the African Conference on Software Engineering and Applied Computing. He is a Fellow of the Computer Society of Kenya (CSK) He has published a number of journals and peer reviewed papers presented at International Conferences and is a principal author of two books; ‘OpenPING: A Principled Approach to Construction of flexible Distributed Virtual Environments using Structural Reflection’ and ‘An adaptive Framework for run-time Group-based Communication’. He joined United States International University-Africa in July 2013 as Associate Dean, School of Science & Technology and Associate Professor of Information Science & Technology. Paul is currently Director, Information and Communications Technology & Chief Information Officer.