Dr Nick Tate is an Author, CEO, Company Director and Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland (UQ). He has over 40 years’ experience in IT including 16 years at CIO level in two London banks and at UQ, as well as 17 years’ experience as a Company Director in 11 Australian and 2 US companies. He is also a founding faculty member of the African Leadership Institute (ALI). He was National President of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in 2012/2013. He was the Director of the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) from 1999 to 2010 and was Chair of the Council of Australasian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT) for 4 years. In 2010, he chaired the World Computer Congress.

He has a PhD in Cybersecurity and is co-author of “A Director’s Guide to Governing Information Technology and Cybersecurity”, a book published recently by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD). In 1990, Dr Tate was Head of IT for the United Bank of Kuwait in London during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf war. During this time, the bank’s shareholders were overrun by an invading army, there was a run on the bank and there was an overnight abolition of the Kuwaiti Dinar which was the bank’s main currency of account. This provided an early grounding in many useful techniques for disaster management in IT and Cybersecurity.

His career has included 20 years with investment/commercial banks including 18 years in London and 2 years at Macquarie Bank in Sydney where he had responsibility for Global IT infrastructure. He has also spent over 15 years working with universities and research organisations and 3 years working on advanced missile systems. He recently directed the $50 million Australian Government funded Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project, which developed and deployed one of the largest data clouds in Australia, to store research data from universities and other research groups.