Ron Catterall
Ron Catterall has lived in San Felipe del Agua, Oaxaca, Mexico since March 1996.
After a short spell as a racing cyclist when he was overall champion of the British Universities Athletic Union in 1956/7, Ron Catterall gained a PhD in Chemical Physics in 1964 and a DSc in 1976. He held faculty positions in the UK and the USA and worked at the Centre Européan pour les Recherches Nucléaires (CERN,Geneva), the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL, Grenoble), the Tri-Universities Meson Facility (TRIUMF, Vancouver) and spent sabbaticals at the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) Daresbury Laboratory and the Atomic Energy of Canada at Chalk River, Ontario. In 1985 he changed to computing and after building and heading the Computer Centre at Sultan Qaboos University, became Head of Computer Services at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London for whom he built a nation-wide internet in 1988 and linked it to the Internet. In 1990 he was a founder member and President of the UK Internet Consortium, and was a member of the Executive and the Technical team building the European backbone for the Internet (EBONE) in 1991. In 1991 he founded IPNetworking Ltd in London offering Internet consultancy services to many major UK enterprises and organising the IPNetworking conferences which hosted the first Internet link to the Soviet block in 1991. In September 1993, the Joint Academic Network (JANET) in the UK finally committed to providing Internet services as their main function, and in September 1994 Ron moved to California as Director of World-Wide networking, remaining in that position until the final commercialisation of the Internet towards the end of 1995. He then retired to Oaxaca in Mexico, but as a consultant designed the networking infrastructure for the new research institutes at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and the University Hospital at CASE Western University. Finally retiring in 2001, he concentrated at last on Middle English poetry, archaeology of the Oaxaca Valley, and was President of the Oaxaca Lending Library in 2002-4.
Contact Ron by email.