Advisory Board Members

Mark Schultz has been managing the design and construction of mission critical facilities for over 18 years. His initial experience included working for the U.S. Navy as a civil engineer corps officer, managing construction projects and leading expeditionary construction forces. Having built data centers in California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado, he returned home to Colorado in 2013. Mark’s project experience includes design and construction management of telecommunication switch facilities, enterprise & colocation data centers, federal laboratories, clean rooms, and corporate office facilities. Projects have ranged from Tier 1 through Tier 4 facilities and have included Uptime Institute® Design & Construction Tier Certified facilities sized from $1 million to $187 million. Mark continues to serve as an officer in the Naval Reserve and is a registered professional engineer in the state of Colorado.

Geoffrey Cope is a Senior Vice President and Technical Officer of Engineering Design Group 2. He is a 20 year veteran in design, deployment, and operational activities for the mission critical industry. His experience includes the design of over 5 million square feet of raised floor for mission critical end users for the government, telecommunications, internet, financial, supercomputing/HPC, and the nuclear power industry. His project portfolio includes design of the first two LEED certified data centers, 1st dual reserve catcher system; innovative designs for 415 volt/60 hertz UPS Systems, Medium Voltage UPS systems, and DC powered UPS systems.

He began his career as a test engineer in the nuclear power industry and helped develop a characterization testing systems used for predictive and preventative maintenance. With these unique skill sets, he has been able to implement testing techniques for the industry that help to reset the clock on reliability. As an advocate of maintenance testing for reliability, he has helped many of his clientele set up maintenance programs for their critical infrastructure.

Ben Stewart has designed, built, and operated energy efficient mission critical facilities around the world. Stewart completed 25 years of military duty retiring as a commander in the U.S. Coast Guard. Upon retirement in 2003, he entered the commercial data center industry joining Terremark Worldwide, Inc., which was acquired by Verizon in 2011, and later acquired by Equinix in 2017. After leaving Equinix, Stewart joined Cyxtera. Stewart earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1982, a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1986, a Master of Science in Business Administration in 1991 and completed his Ph.D. in 2016. He is a Professional Engineer and a Data Center Energy Practitioner. Stewart also sits on the Industrial Advisory Board for the Miami Dade College of Engineering and the Advisory Board for AFCOM. He is the founder and President of the Miami Chapter of AFCOM and sits on the Board of Directors for the 7x24 Mission Critical Alabama/Florida Chapter.

Cindy L. Joos has been in the Data Center industry for the last 17 years. Joos has held multiple leadership positions, and currently, she is the VP, Global Shared Services for Cyxtera Technologies. In this role she manages customer care teams, service delivery, and engineering support for all data centers, maintenance contracts, process, standards, procedures, and metrics. In her roles as Senior Director in the West Region, she managed a team of 180 at 18 Data Centers in the West, supporting $20M of operational and $9M of capital expenditures. In her engineering and mechanical role, she had 24 mechanical and electrical engineers that supported six global regions with 59 global data centers, supporting 1.6 million square feet of data center space and 2.5 megawatts of power. The team created and approved all procedures and processes in the data centers, as well as doing the design, research, and creation of energy and efficiency projects supporting the power usage effectiveness concept. In conjunction with the engineering team, an extensive maintenance management support team handled all vendor support calls and contracts and management for all data centers.  Joos also, managed a controls engineering team supporting all building management systems. The tools team supports IT solutions, including a metrics dashboard and a data center Infrastructure Management tool that is standard across all data centers.

Joos has a Bachelor of Science in computer information systems with a minor in business from Regis University. Joos received the CenturyLink Circle of Excellence in 2013 for the integration of Savvis and Qwest data centers, as well as many spot awards throughout her career. Her team was awarded the Uptime Brill award submitted by and awarded to the CenturyLink Engineering team in 2014.

Michael Cunningham currently holds the office of Associate Vice President / Chief Information Officer (Interim), and Director, University Data Centers for The University of Texas at Austin. He provides leadership for the development and delivery of world-class computing and digital resources for faculty, staff, and students. He has direct responsibility for the University’s Information Technology Services Organization.

Cunningham's career spans thirty years, serving as a leader and executive in the IT Industry. He joined the University of Texas (UT) in 2010, where he oversaw the completion of state-of-the art data centers for the university. Prior to joining UT, Mike held executive roles at Dell and IBM. He holds bachelor and associate degrees. was recognized as AFCOM’s International Data Center Manager of the Year in 2015.

As a member of the Quicken Loans family, Jamie Fogal leads a team of infrastructure and operations engineers whose focus is on leveraging internal and enterprise tool sets to design and build robust, scalable, on-premise and cloud environments. With over 20 years in the IT industry, Jamie’s career spans small startups to large international organizations in the information technology sector. Prior to joining Quicken, he was charged with the design and operation of multistate mission critical data center infrastructure and critical facilities management efforts for large healthcare colos and Fortune 500 enterprises.

Fogal holds professional certifications in data center design (CDCDP), data center management (CDCMP) and data center energy management (DCEP). He is a member of Infragard and AFCOM where he serves as President of the Michigan Chapter. He is an alum of the technology-based academic and professional honor society, Epsilon Pi Tau. He has presented at a number of industry events, including Michigan AFCOM Chapter Conferences, the AFCOM Data Center World event, and at the Critical Power Expo.

Carrie Goetz has been involved in the computing and networking industries for over 30 years. Goetz currently works for Paige DataCom Solutions as the Global Director of Technology shaping the technological future for end user solutions. This global division is responsible for data center and data communications products and services as the newest business division of Paige Electric. Goetz has designed and audited multitudes of data centers for enterprise, colocation, hosting, and cloud facilities. She speaks at numerous industry events, end user education forums and various conferences globally and has been the featured keynote speaker at many. Globally published, Goetz is a frequent industry blogger and expert contributing to over 250 publications worldwide and is published in 69 countries.

Goetz chairs and participates in Women in Data Centers, AFCOM, 7x24Exchange and other forums fostering women in the industry beginning at a young age. She has extensive background in all aspects of networking and application development as a programmer, consultant, project manager, and Fortune 500 executive running IT departments and data centers with multi-million dollar budgets, and has taught at a collegiate level.  Goetz has an MBA and MSBS. She is the former President of the BladeSystems Alliance and member of the Board of Directors. She holds an RCDD/NTS, CDCP, CDCS, is a 1ST Degree Infrastructure Mason, a member of the AFCOM Board of Advisors, and has had 38 other certifications in the industry throughout the years. She has one telecommunications patent.