Biography

Timothy Morgan Pearson was born in Webb City, Missouri in 1958. He graduated from Webb City High School in 1976. In 1977, Pearson was awarded a Reagent's Scholarship to MSSU. During his time as a student, Pearson worked as the Systems Programmer in the Department of Computer Science. In 1980, Pearson received the Outstanding Student in Computer Science award from MSSU. Prior to graduation in 1981, he began teaching seminars on Transaction Driven Processing under the auspices of Dr. John Cragin, academic head of the Department of Computer Science. Pearson graduated from Missouri Southern State University in 1981 with undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. 

From 1981 through 1987, Pearson was a member of the adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at MSSU. 

Beginning in 1981, Pearson was employed as the Director of Information Technologies for Midwestern Telephone. In 1985, he became CIO for the firm. He served in that capacity for over 20 years until he retired from the firm in 2007. During his time at Midwestern Telephone, Pearson worked with IBM engineers on systems development for the IBM Series/1 minicomputer. During this time, he was published in Computerworld Magazine on the topic of the IBM Series/1 and its operating systems. 

In April of 2008, Pearson joined the staff in Information Technology Services at Pittsburg State University. He served as the Unix Systems Administrator for three years prior to being named Interim Assistant Director in 2011 and later became an Assistant Director on a permanent basis. 

Pearson has also served as a volunteer firefighter for over 35 years. The last 20 of those as the Fire Chief of the Carterville, Missouri Fire Department. 

Pearson is currently the Assistant Director for IT Infrastructure and Security at Pittsburg State University. He has just completed the successful design and deployment of a new distributed 3-site "private cloud" infrastructure for PSU's storage/compute/network virtual environment... bringing the survivability and robustness afforded by using distributed "cloud" technology to PSU at a fraction of the cost of renting services from public cloud providers.   During this time, Pearson has also focused on disaster recovery planning for PSU and has presented at EDUCause on the topic of Disaster Recovery planning in the recent past.