Louis Casambre, the first and last executive director of the ICT Office, the predecessor of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), has died at the age of 58.
Photo from DICT
According to his former ICT Office spokesperson and fellow sailing boat enthusiast Roy Espiritu, Casambre was found lifeless by his relatives in their house on Wednesday morning, Feb. 2. Although the exact cause of his death is still being determined as of this time, there are indications he might have died due to cardiac arrest while sleeping, Espiritu said.
Monchito Ibrahim, former undersecretary of the DICT, was the first to relay Casambre’s passing in a Facebook post.
A stern-looking but friendly government executive, Casambre was bon on April 14, 1963. He was recruited by former Department of Science and Technology (DOST) secretary Mario Montejo, a fellow graduate of the UP College of Engineering, to head the ICT Office at the start of the administration of former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III in 2010.
The ICT Office, also known as ICTO, was created through Executive Order 47 but was attached to the DOST. Casambre held the rank of undersecretary.
He served as ICT chief throughout the Aquino presidency but quietly left the scene when the DICT was created in 2016, just before a new administration took over. After his stint at the ICT Office, Casambre became a senior consultant at a company called Nexlogic Telecommunications.
Before becoming the head of the ICT Office, he worked for 14 years as an integrated circuit (IC) design engineer, division manager, and member of the management team at Japanese electronics firm ROHM. He also had a four-year stint as a senior science research specialist at the Advanced Science and Technology Institute of the DOST. An electronics and communications engineer, Casambre worked for a time as an OFW for Hongguan Technologies in Singapore.
Civil society stalwart Al Alegre, who worked for Casambre during the early days of the ICTO, paid a tribute to the departed official on Facebook.
