Dr. Wesley K. Kaplow
Chief technology officer and
vice president, operations & engineering
Qwest government services division

Wes is a recognized expert in a wide range of telecommunications technology, systems, and equipment. As Chief Technology Officer for Qwest government services division he is responsible for technology and product leadership, proposal development, sales engineering, and strategic direction. He is the primary interface to the other product development and planning organizations within Qwest. His accomplishments include leading the successful technical proposal development for the NIH COOP Program, TSA Network, NSF Distributed TeraGrid Program, I-WIRE, NASA NREN network, the Energy Sciences Network, Treasury Communications System Network and many others. Wes also has responsibility for continued product development for these and other programs.

Prior to joining Qwest as one of the founders of Government Services Division in January 1998, Wes was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff for Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies.

He is the author of numerous reports and presentations to the government covering a broad spectrum of issues related to the impact of technology on government operations. This includes technology roadmaps, the impact of and use of MPLS to create private networks, and the evolution of the public telecommunications infrastructure and how it can be used to solve enterprise Information Technology requirements.

More recently, Wes has led Qwest's active participation in such leading-edge programs as the National Science Foundation's Distributed Terascale Facility and organizations such as the Global Grid Forum. His interests center on solving issues such as last mile multi-gigabit/second access and using wavelength services, providing tens of gigabits/second over the wide area, to enable new types of data storage techniques and multi-supercomputer collaboration.

Wes has spoken at numerous conferences and invited talks, including the keynote at CCGrid2004, ICCN2003, GSA FTS User's Conference 2003, Global Grid Forum 5 2002; GSA FTS Next Generation Services Conference 2002; NSF Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyber Infrastructure 2002; NASA NREN Terrestrial and Space Networking Conference 2001; Treasury IT2001 Conference; and NASA NREN Gigabit Networking Conference 2000. He is the author of several refereed journal articles, and holds two patents in optical communications.

Wes received his Doctorate in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and holds a Masters of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from New York University.