By Steve Thorburn

On the evening of Wednesday, March 6, 2025, Scott R. Sharer passed away after a seven-year battle with brain atrophy and dementia caused by vascular degeneration. A gifted communicator, teacher, and engineer, Scott was also a beloved brother and a friend to many in our industry.

I first met Scott at InfoComm ’95 in Dallas, during the launch of the Institute for Professional Development (IPD), the precursor to Super Tuesday and other InfoComm events. During the opening session, Scott and Sandra put on a multimedia extravaganza using PowerPoint — flashing different images synced with audio. In 1995, this was groundbreaking; I had never seen anything like it. Before then, achieving something similar would have required multiple slide projectors and dissolve units. Seeing it produced on a computer was truly remarkable.

Scott Sharer’s creativity set the bar — how could we possibly top it?

While teaching the facility side of InfoComm’s (AVIXA) design school (CTS-D), Scott was always there to help me with the videoconferencing portion. He led videoconferencing sessions for thousands of students who attended InfoComm and also taught related sessions at NSCA and CEDIA events. He is the only person to be named by InfoComm, NSCA and CEDIA as their Educator of the Year. In 2018, he was awarded AVIXA’s Fred Dixon Service in Education Award.

“Scott was one of a kind,” said Gary Kayye, co-founder and director of THE rAVe Agency. “ˆ especially appreciated how opinionated he was and how unafraid he was to express his opinions to whoever would listen. He was a videoconferencing pioneer who saw the UCC market well before most of us even knew what it was. But most of all, Scott was an educator. He lived and thrived on sharing his expertise with all of us, and the industry is better because of his contributions.”

Over dinner one night with Scott and Sandra, Lisa and I learned about some of Scott’s lesser-known extracurricular activities. Few people knew that he was, in his own words, an “expendable civilian resource” for the U.S. military. As a “communications officer” in the 1990s, he provided secure video and audio communications for mission-critical operations, working in the early days of ISDN conferencing to set up CODECs and secure international communication systems — navigating the crude digital infrastructure of the time.

Before one Install School, Scott arrived with his arm in a cast. When I asked what had happened, he simply said, “I can’t talk about it, but let’s just say there were men with swords on horses chasing me.” That was all he would say, and at the time, even Sandra didn’t know the full story. A true patriot.

Another side of Scott that many may not know is that he was an avid motorcycle rider. About 15 years ago at InfoComm, you might have seen him zipping around on a Segway. That was because he had laid his bike down in Savannah after a tourist stepped into the street right in front of him. In that split second, he chose to take the hit himself rather than risk harming someone else.

Before his time in the AV industry, Scott began his career as a professor, lecturing in technical theater at Texas Christian University, then Cornell University and finally at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He got his start in commercial AV as a sales engineer with Communitronics in St. Louis. Most will also remember Scott for his consulting work at Communications Design Group (CDG), where he spent many years providing guidance to end users in both the public and private sectors, as well as working closely with several prominent manufacturers in the AV industry.

Scott later moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he became a partner and general manager at Stage Front Presentation Systems. One of the projects he was especially proud of was helping integrate systems for the King Kong attraction at Universal Studios Florida.

He is survived by his wife, Sandra. The memorial service will be private. If you’d like to share a message with Sandra, please reach out to me at Steve@svAllicat.com, and I will pass them along.

Scott’s formal obituary can be found at: Scott R. Sharer Obituary (2025) – Savannah, GA – Families First Funeral Care & Cremation Center.

Rest in peace, brother.