CCRI Honors Newport Alumnus

Newport native George K. Loftus will be inducted into the Alumni Association’s Society of the Knights this April. He will share the honor with three other Rhode Islanders who have been leaders of their community, found continued professional and personal success, and extended volunteer service to college communities.

Loftus, president and CEO of the Ocean State High Education and Administrative Network (OSHEAN), has dedicated years to solving technological problems and encouraging educational and economic growth around Rhode Island. OSHEAN is a nonprofit group of Rhode Island institutions that works together to solve these problems.

“Our nonprofit communities, our higher education institutions, our hospitals, our state government are all faced with a dilemma,” he said. “They have some of the highest demand for broadband capacity but they have the least ability to pay for it. We [at OSHEAN] spend our time focusing on technical solutions that we can deliver better by delivering them together."

One of OSHEAN’s largest projects is a spending an award of $21.7 million in federal stimulus funds and $10.7 million in private contributions. Their plan is to build a “dedicated fiber-optic network” throughout each county in Rhode Island and in Bristol County in Massachusetts.

“I really think that this is going to help us set Rhode Island on the stage for the new knowledge economy,” he said. Loftus also said the project will include all four CCRI campuses.

Because the CCRI Newport County campus did not exist during the years Loftus attended CCRI, 1977 to 1979, he commuted to the main campus from Newport. Loftus said he chose to study at CCRI because it was one of the only schools that would allow him to study computer science for a degree rather than at a technical school.

“The average iPhone is probably five times more powerful than the computers we used, but they were state-of-the-art at the time,” he said of the early IBM computers he used on campus in the late 1970s.

After CCRI, Loftus left a job as director of network technology at Brown University to found OSHEAN in 2000.

The ceremony and fundraiser will be held on April 1 at the Quidnesset Country Club in North Kingstown at 6 p.m. Sen. Hanna M. Gallo, assistant U.S. Attorney Richard W. Rose, and attorney Betty Anne Waters will also be inducted. For more information click here.