University of Louisiana at Lafayette Leadership

Duane Bailey is a Deputy Director of Athletics/Chief Financial Officer - Interim Director/Campus Auxiliary Services at Louisiana and Esports Consultant at ECAC and is based in Lafayette, Louisiana. He has worked as Manager of Player Compensation at Kansas City Chiefs; Associate Vice President, Director of Athletics and Recreation at University of New Haven; and Business Analyst at CA Technologies Inc. Duane studied at Adelphi University, Long Island University, and St John's University.

My career has spanned positions in state government and higher education, where I've served in senior contract and procurement leadership positions. Presently, serving in the position of Director of Purchasing for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I have the fun of working in an environment that is invigorating and provides a strong sense of accomplishment. In the role of Executive Director of Procurement and Property Management for Louisiana State University College and University System, I was responsible for setting the vision and strategy for procurement and sourcing for a university with a ~$251 million addressable spend base. I spearheaded the implementation of the first eProcurement platform for managing university-wide spend as well as a shared services model for system-wide procurement. In this role, I designed and led an effort to pass a university pilot procurement code before the State Legislature. I served as strategic advisor to LSU for legislative policy matters for the university on procurement and contracts, frequently interacting with legislators and state agencies.

Previous to my position at LSU, I served for more than ten years as the Assistant Administrator for Louisiana State Contracts and Grants in the State Office of Contractual Review, where I was responsible for the administration of all professional, personal, consulting and social service contracts and cooperative endeavor agreements for the State of Louisiana. In this capacity I served as the State’s technical consultant on complex contracting and procurement policy issues for a diverse group of stakeholders, including the Office of the Governor, state department Secretaries, the Commissioner of Administration, Legislative Auditor, Inspector General and the State Legislature.

Paul Thomas is a Chief Human Resources Officer at Louisiana and is based in Lafayette, Louisiana. He has worked as Human Resources Specialist at First Tennessee Bank, Senior Personnel Representative at FEDEX CORP, and Past Past President at TN-CUPA-HR. Paul studied at Tennessee State University between 1982 and 1987, Bolton High, and University of Memphis between 1990 and 1991.

[2014] Principal Investigator, “CC*IIE Network Infrastructure: Cyberinfrastructure - Creation of Science DMZ at UL Lafayette.\'​ NSF Award (#1440772) funded for the amount of $491,513.

[2011] Blundell assisted researchers at Louisiana State University by creating Internet2 ION circuits for a successful re-configurable optical network emulator aggregate (CRON) connection to the GENI backbone over Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI).

[2007-2008] Blundell served as a team member of the EnLIGHTened Computing Collaboration where a coalition from various university institutions developed an inter-domain reservation system for coordinating network and computing resources over national and international research test beds.

[2005-2010] Blundell served as engineer on the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), designing and building ten 40 Gb/s optical networks connecting all of the research universities across the state of Louisiana and installing high-performance computing clusters (aggregate 80 TFlops) across this network to support collaborative computational science research.

[2010] Blundell served as a team leader for SCinet (SuperComputing) WAN delivering one 100 Gb/s circuit and seventeen 10 Gb/s fiber circuits between New Orleans Louisiana and various Regional Optical Networks (RONs) across the nation.

[1998-1999] Blundell designed, built, and managed disaster recovery data network systems for Entergy Corporation’s 4 nuclear power plants, involving 1200 miles of fiber over a four state area.

Duane Bailey is a Deputy Director of Athletics/Chief Financial Officer - Interim Director/Campus Auxiliary Services at Louisiana and Esports Consultant at ECAC and is based in Lafayette, Louisiana. He has worked as Manager of Player Compensation at Kansas City Chiefs; Associate Vice President, Director of Athletics and Recreation at University of New Haven; and Business Analyst at CA Technologies Inc. Duane studied at Adelphi University, Long Island University, and St John's University.