German Retana enrolled in the IT Management PhD program in 2008. Since early in the program he started learning about the emerging cloud computing industry. In his most current research, he works directly with the business analytics team of a major public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. He employs econometric methods to study how the provider's technical support influences the way tens of thousands of customers make use of the on-demand cloud servers. He has presented his work at academic conferences including the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), and the INFORMS Annual Meeting, among others, and has also presented his research to industry executives of the cloud provider he is working with and to the Atlanta cloud community. One of his research articles is being prepared for second round revision at Management Science.

At the Scheller College of Business, he designed and has successfully taught 3 times the Data Business Communications course, with ratings of 4.8, 4.91, and 4.84 (out of 5.0) in each occasion. He was recently designated as the college’s nominee for the 2013 Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) / BP Outstanding Teaching Award, in category of Graduate Student serving as instructor of record. Last year, he was one of the 2 students (out of 45) who were awarded the 2012 Ashford Watson Stalnaker Memorial Prize for Student Excellence in the PhD program, which considered his performance in both research and teaching.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, German headed a 60+ users SAP implementation in Costa Rica. He also worked in a regional systems integration project that relied on remote computing technologies. As part of his MBA internship, he collaborated in an MIT Media Lab project that involved wireless connectivity in a rural town.

German holds an MBA (with distinction) from INCAE Business School - Costa Rica, a Master's degree in Project Management from the University for International Collaboration - Costa Rica, and a BS degree (honor graduate) in Computer Engineering from the Costa Rican Institute of Technology. He was also an MBA exchange student for a semester at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management (HHL) - Germany. German is a Costa Rican with a strong passion for his country and who enjoys playing soccer and dancing salsa very much.