Kendra Ard and Ed Clark of the California State University Chancellor's Chief Information Office Recognized with 2026 CENIC AIR Award for Engagement
La Mirada, CA & San Francisco, CA — February 18, 2026 — The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) is pleased to announce that Chief Infrastructure Officer Kendra Ard and Chief Information Officer Ed Clark of the California State University (CSU) Chancellor’s Chief Information Office will be recognized with the 2026 CENIC AIR Award for Engagement. The award will be presented at CENIC’s biennial conference “The Right Connection” to be held from March 31–April 1, 2026 in Monterey, CA.
When CENIC started working years ago with some of its members to launch the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR), it was clear that its ultimate success would be based on engaging a broad array of CSU faculty and students throughout California. Working with a range of disciplines among multiple CSU institutions has enabled CENIC AIR to deliver on its promise of spurring creativity and innovation across the CENIC higher education community.
Kendra Ard and Ed Clark have nurtured collaborations and training to support the intellectual contributions of faculty, staff, and students in both AI and high-performance computing. In addition to creating supportive environments, the proactive encouragement of faculty and student teams has led to exponential growth in the value and impact of CENIC AIR.
As faculty and researchers engaged, institutions recognized the need for more bandwidth. The Chancellor’s Office leadership was critically important to the work of CENIC engineering in standing up the first 800 Gbps circuit in California at San Diego State University (SDSU)—a landmark achievement for R&E networks.
CENIC currently counts 11 CSU campuses actively engaged with CENIC AIR, supporting over 300 individual faculty and their students in research, with thousands of students in class labs, and with other CSU campuses in various stages of planning and deployment.
Additionally, the success of CENIC AIR projects has inspired several California Community Colleges to join the initiative, greatly strengthening the state’s ability to develop the skilled, AI-enabled workforce needed to continue California’s technology and economic leadership into the future.
Related blog posts
The CENIC AI Resource Powers Diverse Disciplines at CENIC Member Campuses
Learn how researchers at non-R1 institutions or those who need only a handful of GPUs can benefit from CENIC AIR, which can catapult their work to the next level and enable them to collaborate and compete with peers from larger, better-resourced institutions.
Celebrating Dr. Ben Izadi’s Leading Role in the CENIC and Cypress College Student Internship Program
Now in its 15th year, the CENIC internship program has given more than 100 students hands-on training and real experience in advanced networking, developed in partnership with Cypress College’s Professor Ben Izadi, who was instrumental in its success.