Gerri Sinclair

CEO, Centre for Digital Media; Director, Masters of Digital Media Program

Gerri Sinclair is currently the Executive Director of the Masters of Digital Media Program, as well as the CEO of the Centre for Digital Media, a collaborative partnership between the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and the B.C. Institute of Technology. Most recently she was the Chair of the Canadian Federal Government’s Telecom Policy Review Panel, advising the Federal Government on the future policy and regulatory environment required to support an advanced telecommunications framework. She was also the General Manager of MSN Canada and a senior member of the Microsoft executive team, as well as the founder and CEO of NCompass Labs, an Internet content management company acquired by Microsoft in 2001

As a former visiting scientist at IBM Research, Dr. Sinclair was also the president of the British Columbia Government Premier’s Technology Council, and the founding director of the ExCITE lab at Simon Fraser University, the first multimedia educational technology centre in Canada. She has served on several government and corporate boards including Telus Corporation and BC Telecom, and is currently a director of the Toronto Stock Exchange, Ballard Power, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

She is the recipient of the YWCA Woman of Distinction award, the Canadian Women in Communications’ Woman of the Year award, the Canadian Women in New Media Pioneer award, the Influential Woman in Business award, the Sarah Kirke award for the most outstanding Canadian woman in High Tech, the 2005 Canadian Consumer Choice Award for Business Woman of the Year, and most recently the 2008 Canadian Public Policy Forum Testimonial Award. She holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama as well as an honorary Doctor of Science in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia.