Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Fall 2018

Edouard Alligand, CEO, QuasarDB.
With a background in mathematics and computer science, Edouard started his career in software security with a focus on C++, kernel programming, and system programming, topics on which he contributed articles and books. In 2008, Edouard shifted his career towards financial markets, building trading systems for equity derivatives firms. He is the founder and CEO of quasarDB since 2014.

Olivier Baetz, COO, NovaSparks.
Olivier is the COO of NovaSparks, a company he joined in 2011 and is a recognized expert in ultra-low latency market data and trading solutions. Prior to NovaSparks, Olivier ran the sales engineering function for BT Radianz in North America. He spent the first half his career in telecoms, designing and selling managed corporate network solutions for large multinationals. Olivier holds a MS in Telecom Engineering from ENST Paris and an MBA from Wharton with a major in Finance. When he is not working, Olivier enjoys kiteboarding, surfing, skiing and all the good wines from around the world.

Keith Bazarnick, Master Engineer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Keith has 22 years in designing and deploying complex high performance computing solutions across multiple industries. Prior to solution design Keith worked in Finance designing and supporting decision support systems for Fund Managers and research department at a major Mutual Fund Company.

Chase Boyle, Director, Product Management - Blockchain, Zayo Group.
Chase is the Director of Product Management for Spread Networks by Zayo and the Director of Blockchain Business Development at Zayo Group. Zayo is focused on understanding the impact that blockchain technology will have on the network infrastructure, specifically as it relates to today’s traditional financial exchanges and how new cryptocurrency exchanges will set the standard for the future of technology used in financial markets. Chase has been trading cryptocurrencies in his personal portfolio for more than 8 years and has held multiple roles within Zayo, across Mobile Infrastructure, Dark Fiber and Finance, over the past 5 years.

Laurent de Barry, Co-founder & Chief Sales Officer, Enyx.
Laurent has worked in Ultra Low Latency Technology for close to 10 years and co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads the development and commercialization of the next generation FPGA-enabled market access technology. A hardware engineer by training, Laurent is passionate about high performance computing and bringing cutting-edge technology to market. Prior to co-founding Enyx, he worked on critical hardware components for the aeronautical and military industries.

Michel Debiche, Guest Analyst, STAC.
Michel is both quant and technologist, whose passion is making data science actually work for financial firms. He is currently leading the expansion of the STAC community to include more buyside firms looking to leapfrog to the best technologies and Analytics Ops processes for quant/quantamental investing. Prior to STAC, Michel re-engineered strategy development and implementation at numerous firms, first as a quant, then as a consultant. Employers include CSFB, Daiwa, First New York, CIBC, and Think Big Analytics, where he led the financial services practice. Michel has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities.

Paul Famighetti, Global Head of Exchange Technology, DRW.
Paul is the Global Head of Exchange Technology at Cumberland –a global leader in cryptoassets, specializing in institutional-sized liquidity. Paul joined the Cumberland team with more than 20 years of experience in electronic trading. He was previously the CIO and Managing Director at RGM Advisors before joining DRW through the acquisition in 2017. He is responsible for managing relationships with exchanges and overseeing Cumberland’s external trading technology. He holds a BA from Villanova University.

Davor Frank, Director, WW Sales Engineering, Solarflare Communications.
Davor Frank is the Director of WW Sales Engineering, Solarflare. Having joined in October of 2011, he brings to Solarflare over a decade of experience in Investment Banking technology. Davor is currently responsible for application and systems consulting, providing architecture guidance to customers looking to implement Solarflare technologies in their infrastructure. Previously, Davor had worked as a systems engineer at Deutsche Bank on the Enterprise UNIX infrastructure, more recently focusing on design, implementation and operational support of ultra-low latency systems.

Francisco Girela López, Senior FPGA Engineer, Seven Solutions.
Francisco obtained his Master on Telecommunications Engineering degree in the University of Granada. Before ending these studies, he started working as a technical consultant in an international company. After some time, he went back to the University where he accepted a job as a researcher. During his research, he specialized in ultra-accurate time transfer systems and he focused on the development of the White Rabbit technology. Nowadays he works for Seven Solutions where he is a Senior FPGA engineer and the technical responsible for business support for North America clients. Simultaneously, he is carrying out his PhD in telecommunication engineering.

Derek Groothuis, MD & Head of Engineering, Coinbase Markets.
Derek has more than three decades of engineering experience, most recently as CTO of a Singapore-based trading and machine learning company. Prior to this, he served as Chief Software Officer for DRW Trading for 7 years, growing his 100-person team into one of the most successful in modern finance. He is an active investor and advisor to the Chicago startup community. Derek holds a BA in cognitive science from Northwestern University.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, VP Technology, Exablaze.
Matthew has been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 9 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks.

Amit Kaushik, Head Of Research and Portfolio Management, Blockseed Investments.
Amit's fund invests in digital assets and cryptocurrencies using quantitative and systematic strategies. Amit is an investment professional with over twelve years of Wall Street Sell Side and Buy Side experience. He is a successful quantitative researcher with extensive experience in modeling and development of Interest Rate Structured Products, Commodities Exotics, and Cross Currency Correlation Options. His experience includes quantitative strategist/researcher/analyst roles with the structured products trading desk at the Bank of America, commodities and rates exotics derivatives at the Barclays, and commodities and FX at the Millennium Management. Amit received an MS focused on quantitative research in Business from the Penn State and an MS and BS in Engineering from IIT Bombay. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst® and the Certificate in Quantitative Finance® designations.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

John Lockwood, CEO, Algo-Logic.
John is the founder and CEO of Algo-Logic and has over 30 years of experience of mapping algorithms into FPGA logic. He served as a Professor at Stanford University, was tenured at Washington University in Saint Louis, and holds a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. John has engineered high-speed networks for the National Center for Supercomputing Appilcations (NCSA), designed high-speed datalink controllers at IBM, deployed multicast networks at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and served as the PI on grants from NSF, Xilinx, Altera, and SAIC. He has published over 100 papers and patents related to networks and FPGA applications.

Matt Meinel, SVP Solutions Engineering, Sales and Business Development, Levyx.
Matt is a veteran innovator / entrepreneur in Capital Markets financial technology. He has been a key player at several successful, innovative financial technology firms including:Co-founder at startup 29West (low latency messaging technology) which exited to Informatica; RedHat CIO during transition period to the now popular subscription business model; Principal at O’Connor & Associates (bought by Swiss Bank which was acquired by UBS Investment Bank). At Swiss Bank he served as co-CIO and later at UBS Investment bank was Global Head of IT for the Fixed Income & Treasury Division.

Venkatesh Nagapudi, VP of Product and Solutions Management, Vexata.
Venky has 20 years of experience in engineering, product, marketing and business development roles in storage, networking and compute industries. Prior to Vexata, Venky headed up product management for cutting edge storage at EMC, and datacenter products at Applied Micro. Prior to that, Venky held various engineering leadership roles at Brocade, Intel and startups building networking and compute chips. Venky has an MBA from Haas business school at UC Berkeley, a Masters from NCSU, and a Bachelors from IIT Madras.

Jerry Nelligan, CTO, XR Trading.
Over 27 years in trading industry with experience as a network engineer, systems programmer, systems integrator, database administrator, developer, trader, and leader. Fortunate to be a part of excellent teams addressing execution, analysis, latency, research, market data, and compliance in the securities and futures industries.

Travis Oliphant, founder of NumFOCUS, Anaconda, and Quansight.
Travis is a co-founder of Quansight, a services firm that helps companies take advantage of the explosion of Open Source Software (OSS) for obtaining QUANtitative inSIGHT on their data. Prior to that, Travis co-founded Anaconda Inc. NumFOCUS. Since 1997, he has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming, having authored and/or directed the teams for several popular Python tools for data science, including NumPy, SciPy, Numba, Dask, JupyterLab, and Ananconda. Travis holds a PhD from the Mayo Clinic and BS and MS degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering from BYU.

Brian Peterson, Managing Director, Hehmeyer Trading + Investments.
Brian has more than a decade of experience researching, designing, developing, and deploying production quantitative trading systems. He is the Managing Director for quantitative trading and cryptocurrencies at Hehmeyer Trading + Investments in Chicago, and has held similar roles at other prominent Chicago trading firms for almost 20 years. Brian has deep experience delivering large, technically complex production systems utilizing the latest technologies and techniques, including advanced optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, low-latency execution, and algorithm design. In addition, Brian researches, publishes, and teaches. He holds an appointment as a lecturer in quantitative trading systems design in the University of Washington Applied Mathematics, Computational Finance and Risk Management graduate department. Brian is co-author or maintainer of over 10 packages for using the R statistical language in finance, acts as the organization administrator for R's participation in the prestigious annual Google Summer of Code program, and is on the organizing committee of the annual R/Finance conference.

Russel Santillanes, Financial Services Industry Technical Specialist, Intel.
Russel is aligned to the Financial Services vertical, leveraging his decade of experience in the industry. Prior to Intel, Russel worked at a leading financial institution as an engineer and architect in their client and server computing teams, and has a strong working knowledge of creating and innovating leading (and low latency) technology solutions.

Joel Sehr, VP Americas, SQream Technologies.
Joel brings over 20 years of sales management expertise in a variety of database and software companies, with proven sales strategy and a deep understanding of database technologies. At SQream, Joel is in charge of leading the sales efforts and spearheading the entrance into the US market.

Dr David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David very recenty joined Arista when it acquired Metamako. David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, where he looked after product and technology strategy. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for electronic trading firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems from the University of NSW, Australia, looking at the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Outside of work, David spends time designing, building and racing high-performance solar powered cars in international events and formerly held the Guinness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Mike Strickland, Data Center Solutions Architect, Intel.
Mike has more than twenty years of computer, networking and storage experience with companies such as Hewlett Packard, Silverback Systems, and Altera, which is now a part of Intel. He currently is leading the FPGA Data Analytics vision across the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. Previously Strickland has led the development and launch of numerous products including networking, storage management, TCP/IP Offload and iSCSI. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and a M.S. degree in management from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

Will Vick, AI Business Development, HPE.
Will has over 8 years in HPC, Big Data, & Artificial Intelligence workloads as well as how customers tailor these solutions towards their requirements. He has worked in previous roles in Hyperscale server product management, Big Data, & HPC Solutions. Will is working to enable edge to cloud to core designs with partners & customers to enable A.I.