Terry Coatta is currently the CTO of Marine Learning Systems, a company in Vancouver BC Canada that specializes in online solutions for training and safety in the marine industry. Prior to that he has lead the technology departments at a number of startups in the Vancouver area. Terry has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia (1994). His Ph.D. research was in the area of configuration management for Distributed Systems, and he has retained an interest in leading edge distributed technologies throughout his career.

Terry has also held a number of different volunteer positions at  the ACM. He is currently the chair of the Practitioners Board, which is responsible for both several products and services targeted at ACM’s practitioner members, as well as providing guidance to the organization as a whole on the needs of practitioners. He is also currently a member of the editorial board at Queue, ACM’s electronic magazine devoted to topics of interest to practitioners.