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Appointee Biographies

Ontario Centre of Innovation Inc.

PAUL DESJARDINS

Paul Desjardins resides in Toronto, with deep roots in Ontario’s North. He is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Move Add Change, which advocates dual-use approaches to close the digital divide for remote, rural and Indigenous Canadians. Paul’s career spans four decades in Enterprise sales to Canada’s critical infrastructure sectors, assembling Enterprise solutions from the foundational building blocks of broadband, software, and cloud. He is a member of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority and a supporter of Wikipedia Foundation and Internet Archive. He has spent four years as Secretary-Treasurer of Canada’s oldest ski club. More recently, Paul was a program contributor, adjudicator, and coach for the Canada-Ukraine Security Innovation Challenge (CUSIC). Paul studies with the Institute of Corporate Directors, to contribute more effectively to modern corporate governance. Paul’s personal approach involves challenging assumptions, and re-imagining possibilities through innovative solutions that transform.

DAVID CUNNINGHAM

David Cunningham is a serial entrepreneur with 4 decades of professional software and systems design experience in areas such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Military Systems, Medial Research, Commercial, Scientific, and Software Tools, Professional Associations and Unions. In 2007 Microsoft acquired technology from one of David’s companies, Dundas Data Visualization Inc., for inclusion in SQL Server Enterprise Edition, Microsoft’s flagship Data storage product. David was proud to be named a winner of the top 100 Fastest Growing companies in Canada (Profit Magazine), top 100 Fastest Growing North American Technology Companies (Deloitte & Touché), PC-Magazine's Editors' Choice Award for C++ development toolkits and named an International Top 100 Innovator and Leader 7-years in a row (SDTimes). David is a founder of DeveloperMedia a community of more than 23 million software developers and Chairman of Dundas Data Visualization a world leader in Big Data and data visualization.

ANDREA MANDEL-CAMPBELL

Andrea Mandel-Campbell is a Senior Vice-President and leads the Capital Markets practice for NATIONAL Public Relations. Prior to joining NATIONAL, she co-launched the Toronto of NY-based CEO advisory firm, Teneo. A former Vice-President, Corporate Communications, with Kinross Gold, a leading Canadian gold producer, Andrea also served as Director of Communications for the President of the Treasury Board in Ottawa. A long-time financial journalist, Andrea was a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times of London in Latin America and an anchor for CTV's Business News Network. She is the author of the iconic Canadian business book, 'Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson,' which was nominated for the Writer's Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize. She is a founding board member of Startup Canada, and currently sits on the Board of the Canadian Club of Toronto. She resides in Toronto with her husband and two children.