It is my pleasure to announce that Hieu Mai (Simon) joined the Technical Operations and Services unit at PALS on July 18. He comes to PALS with five years technical experience. He graduated from Minnesota State University, Mankato with a Master’s degree in Information Technology in May 2012, at which time he worked as a Teaching Assistant for the Department of Computer Systems and Technology at MSU. As he says “I have learned that every student is a unique individual with a unique story, but they all have a common goal – to be a successful graduate. I am enthusiastic about helping each student achieve this goal. I am excited to become a member of Technical Services unit at PALS”.

After more than five years of working and research in information technology Simon has turned his attention to accessibility technology research, especially technology for programming, website development, networking security, and database systems. He continues to research with his professor Mahbubur Syed in the security of cloud computing. He has continuing interests in mobile services and automata based computational complexity theory and distributed computing.

Simon will be spending his first few weeks at PALS familiarizing himself with our service infrastructure and staff and then will be working on our Open Source products and services.

Simon’s main hobby is playing guitar. He considers himself an amateur guitarist with a lot of enthusiasm for the music. He enjoys playing and singing any love song whose singers he likes, such as “My Heart Will Go On”, “To Love You More” (Celine Dion), “You Belong With Me” (Taylor Swift), and “What a Beautiful Day” (Chris Cagle). When not at work, he has a guitar in his hand playing music for his wife Virginia and 2-year-old son Anthony. You will be able to meet him in person at the PALS User Group Meeting in October.

We're all looking forward to having him on our team. As you can see from the following photograph, he has already internalized the PALS Sprit! His email address is hieu.mai@mnsu.edu. Please join us in welcoming him.

Stephen F. Elfstrand
PALS Executive Director