Les LaCroix ’79
I started in Carleton IT in 1975 as a student worker. In 1979 I became the first full-time employee of Academic Computing, supervising the student workers, overseeing the computing labs, performing technical administration of the computing systems, and on occasion giving a guest lecture on using statistics software in classes. I wrote the first email system used on campus, the first spell checker, and the first card-catalog-lookup program for the library.
In the mid 80s I took a software engineering position at SPSS, contributing to their mainframe, PC, and macOS implementations. Later in the 80’s I left SPSS for Unisys, working in a small artificial intelligence (AI) group writing hardware and software configurators.
In the early 90s I returned to Carleton with the title I first had, but by then was a very different job. Since then I have held a number of roles, including interim co-director of Academic Computing, leading the systems and networking team, and leading the enterprise information systems team. Today I work on various projects but am focusing mostly on data integration and identity and access management (IAM). I have been interested in IAM for a couple of decades, and am currently the vice chairman of the Internet2 Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity (CACTI).
At Carleton since 1991.