Dr. Gerri Sinclair’s cross-domain career includes more than 25 years’ experience spanning the fields of Internet, mobile and digital media technologies, entrepreneurial business, and government policy. She was the founder and CEO of NCompass Labs, the Internet digital content management company acquired by Microsoft in 2001. She then joined the Microsoft Senior Executive team as Country Manager for Canada for MSN. A former IBM Consulting Scholar as well as a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research in New York, Sinclair was also the first President of the British Columbia Government Premier’s Technology Council, and the founding director of the ExCITE lab at Simon Fraser University, the first digital media technology R&D centre in Canada.
In 2005-2006 she served as chair of the Canadian Telecom Policy Review Panel, a three member “wise persons” panel advising the Government of Canada on the policy and regulatory environment required to support an advanced telecommunications framework. From 2006-2010, Sinclair was the Founder and CEO of the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus where she developed and directed an innovative graduate school program awarding a Master’s Degree in digital entertainment, mobile/social media and video game design, and accredited by the four leading universities in Vancouver.
She has served on several government and corporate boards including Telus Corporation, BC Telecom, and Ballard Power, as well as Canada’s Information Highway Advisory Council and the National Broadband Taskforce. In addition to being a member of the Toronto Montreal Stock Exchange Board of Directors (TMX), she is currently a director of the Vancouver Airport Authority (YVR), as well as on the Board of ThinkData, a Toronto-based start-up in the field of Big Data.
Sinclair is the recipient of many awards in business, entrepreneurship, and technology innovation, including 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, and the Sarah Kirke award for the most outstanding Canadian woman in High Tech. In 2005 she was honored with the Canadian Consumer Choice Award for Business Woman of the Year. In 2008, she received the Canadian Public Policy Forum Testimonial Award for her outstanding contribution to the quality of public policy and public management in Canada. She also won the 2010 BC innovation Council Entrepreneurship Fellow Award.
She holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama as well as an honorary Doctor of Science in Computing Science from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as a Senior Innovation Strategist at Ryerson University in Toronto, and at Telefonica’s Advanced Multimedia Research Lab in Barcelona, Spain.