Rita Puzmanova is an independent networking specialist, writer, course developer and trainer. Since completing her postgraduate studies and working as an assistant professor, Rita has worked independently with two exceptions: working at ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute in Sophia Antipolis, a.k.a. French Silicon Valley) and consulting at systems integrator (Cisco Gold Partner). She also worked as a contractor of the European Commission responsible for an extensive European program aimed at restructuring national telecommunications sector.

Rita acted as a Certified Cisco Systems Instructor in 1994-1999 and as such has trained technical audience throughout Europe (in English, Spanish, Russian) to help them understand networking and router/switch operations, and to lead them to various certifications. Since then she has developed her own internetworking courses and has also become involved in an on-line education with her own "TCP/IP Specialist" web-based course offered via University of California, Los Angeles.

Rita holds M.Sc. (1989) in systems engineering (from Czech Technical University, Prague), Ph.D. (1992) in telecommunications (from Czech Technical University, Prague, with help of scholarships at Universidad de Valladolid and Politecnica de Madrid, Spain). Working independently does not mean that no management skills are needed, rather the contrary, which is why Rita has recently completed an MBA program with University of Calgary (Canada).

Rita has written a number of technical articles published in local and international print and on-line media. She is also an author of several books on networking and TCP/IP. The most recent one is "Routing and Switching: Time of Convergence?", published by Addison Wesley.

Rita is member of Communications and Computer Societies, and Standards Association of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and is active in Czech standardization committee on information technologies. She was also a founder and chairperson of the Czech Telecommunications Users Association.

Rita is multilingual, having studied and worked in many countries. She is interested in non-technical issues such as languages and translations, as well as creative thinking (she holds an Edward de Bono certificate on General Thinking Skills). Rita's great passion are her numerous cats that besides bringing pleasures help her become quite strong in veterinary science and art.