Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Fall 2022

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Bishop ensures that STAC’s research, benchmark standards, and software tools meet the needs of STAC’s community. He has over 30 years of experience, including research roles at State Street, IBM Research, and Computational Logic, Inc. in diverse areas including machine learning, automated reasoning, formal verification, embedded systems, and computer energy management. Before joining STAC, he contributed to new STAC benchmarks and developed STAC Benchmark implementations on multiple platforms. Bishop is an IBM Master Inventor, Senior Member of the IEEE, has passed the CFA Exam Level III, and holds a BS in Chemistry and BA and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Matt Certosimo, Data Center FPGA Field Application Engineer, AMD.
Matt has over 12 years of experience working with FPGAs. He studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Matt has been working with AMD Xilinx since 2015. In his current role, Matt helps Product sales and support for Financial Services and Data Center applications.

Laurent de Barry, Director, Hardware Trading Solutions, Exegy.
Laurent co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23 and has 10+ years of experience developing ultra-low latency technology. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads product and technology strategy, while overseeing the development of the next generation FPGA-enabled trading solutions. An electrical and computer science 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.

Malcolm deMayo, Global Vice President - Financial Services Industry, NVIDIA.
Malcolm is Global Vice President, Financial Services Industry. Malcolm is responsible for creating and driving the Global FSI strategy with product and geography leaders. He is responsible for building a robust opportunity pipeline and establish long term business relationships and strategic relevance with selected high revenue FSI customers. Malcolm also leads a virtual team of technical, business, and sales, and marketing resources across NVIDIA and partners to achieve mutual success. Previously, Malcolm oversaw Strategic FSI Clients at Oracle where he led strategic partnership with G-SIBs to modernize Finance, Core and Investment Banking with Modern SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions.

Jacob Farmer, Founder and Chief Evangelist, Starfish Storage.
Jacob is the founder and chief evangelist for Starfish Storage. He is a storage industry veteran with over 30 years' experience with backups, archives, large file systems, and research data management.

Davor Frank, Sr. Manager Field Apps Engineering, AMD.
Davor is the Senior Manager Field Applications Engineering at AMD. Davor started his career in Investment Banking technology, transitioning from the traditional Enterprise UNIX Infrastructure towards low latency trading infrastructure in the late 2000s. Since joining Solarflare, he spent the past decade focusing on applications and systems consulting, providing system and software architecture guidance to customers looking to improve performance of mission critical trading applications. Davor holds a degree in Computer Science from University of Zagreb

John Hagerman, VP Marketing and Business Development, Algo-Logic.
In this role, he is responsible for Algo-Logic’s marketing, corporate communications, and business development functions. Prior to joining Algo-Logic, John served as President of BrandGate, a business advisory consulting company where he worked with a number of clients who delivered innovative solutions in storage, networking, Smart Home/IoT, Data Warehousing, and Artificial intelligence markets. Over the course of his career, he has held senior sales, marketing, business development, and management leadership positions at 3Com, Maxtor, NetEffect, Neterion/Exar, and Myricom. John holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Santa Clara University, where he also obtained an MBA.

Ian Hutchinson, Markets Technology, a global bank.
Ian is an independent consultant who works with asset managers, banks, and other financial firms to solve business problems at the intersection of markets and technology. He leverages his experience as a high frequency trader to advise on, design, and implement everything from scalable, cloud-based research platforms to complete low-latency trading systems. Currently, he is engaged by a desk at a major bank, helping to eletronify their operation. He has a bachelors in Computer Science and Math.

Dr. Daryl Inniss, Director, OFS Fitel, LLC.
Daryl has been in fiber optics and telecommunications for over 30 years. He was formerly Practice Leader at market research firm Ovum and RHK where he covered advanced telecommunication technologies. Daryl co-authored Silicon Photonics (Morgan Kaufmann, 2016) and was a Technical Manager at JDSU and Lucent Technologies, formerly AT&T. Daryl holds a PhD in Chemistry from UCLA and an AB from Princeton University. He is from St. Thomas, the US Virgin Islands and has lived on the east and west coasts, the mid-west and is currently in Boulder, CO.

Manisha Kimmel, Head of Business Integration, Low Latency Group, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Manisha is responsible for leading the business integration of MayStreet, focusing on commercial, product, and marketing strategy. Pre-acquisition, Manisha was MayStreet’s Chief Policy Officer focused on regulatory advocacy. Prior to MayStreet, she served as Senior Policy Advisor, Regulatory Reporting to the SEC Chair. Additionally, she held senior roles at Refinitiv, the Financial Information Forum and Jordan & Jordan. She served as chair of the CAT NMS Advisory Committee and on the SEC’s Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee. Manisha holds a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Matthew Klos, Senior Solutions Architect, IBM.
Matt is a Senior Solutions Architect at IBM with many years of experience designing customer storage environments specifically around parallel filesystems. Matt has years of experience benchmarking and deploying storage environments for a multitude of use cases including AI/Ml, analytics, and traditional HPC.

Peter Lankford, Founder and Executive Chairman, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter led the creation of STAC in 2006 to reduce the enormous time and effort the finance industry invests in evaluating high technology. As Executive Chairman, Peter focuses on key growth initiatives and ensures that STAC continues to strengthen the principles and practices that the community values. Peter has over 30 years of experience in technology and financial services, including SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters and management positions at Citibank, First Chicago, and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Master’s in International Relations, and Bachelor’s in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Cliff Maddox, Director of Business Development, NovaSparks.
Cliff has over 30 years’ experience in the trading industry. He joined NovaSparks in 2017 as a U.S. Sales Manager and now leads the sales team. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Cliff worked at Activ Financial Systems for eight years, holding various positions in the business and sales organization. Prior to that, Cliff spent 20 years developing his capital market expertise by leading numerous software development projects for wide variety of major banks and trading firms

Ben Maron, FPGA Team Lead, Hudson River Trading.
Ben leads worldwide FPGA and ASIC development at HRT. Prior to his current role, he spent over 10 years building ASICs for experimental supercomputers at IBM Research. Ben loves novel computer architecture and has a BS in Computer Science from MIT.

Keith Miller, Vice President Technical Sales, Services and Support, DDN.
Keith is a 25 year veteran of the HPC and AI ecosystems where he has worked with a variety of customers across the public and private sector. He began his career at SGI where he held a number of field technical positions. In 2006 Keith joined DDN as Field engineer and later moved into Technical management. In 2014, Keith left for Cray where he led the US Field Support and the WW Professional Services and Project Management teams. Keith rejoined DDN in August 2021 as VP, Americas Services and Support where he runs the Technical Pre-Sales and Professional services teams.

Peter Nabicht, President, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent nearly 20 years driving change at the intersection of technology and complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage this experience to guide the continued rapid growth of the STAC community. His key roles prior to STAC include: CTO of Allston Trading, developing and supporting multi-asset, low latency trading systems; Co-founder of 12Sided Technology, which developed high-throughput network data capture and analytics; and Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a BA in English and a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.

Tamir Ostfeld, Deputy CEO and COO, RAFT Technologies.
Tamir joined RAFT in Aug 2017. He brings over 25 years of experience, making Tamir an expert in managing multi-disciplinary cross-cultural companies and building R&D and Operations groups. Tamir masters a wide range of technologies, including connectivity (HF Radio, Wi-Fi, GNSS, BT, NFC, M.W, WIGIG), video, network, SW, HW, VLSI, RF design, and qualification & standards. Before joining Raft, Tamir held the positions of VP R&D for Alvarion Ltd., Director Mobile Connectivity Product System Group for Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), and VP core technology for BigBand Networks (Nasdaq: BBND). Tamir holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from TAU.

Vahan Sardaryan, Co-Founder and CEO, LDA Technologies.
Vahan is a Co-Founder and the CEO at LDA Technologies, a known provider of leading high-performance FPGA-based networking products. Vahan’s experience in software design goes back 20 years and encompasses various fields such as high-performance networking, information security, realtime systems and such. He has been involved in electronic trading industry for over 12 years, 8 years of which was dedicated to HFT companies’ needs. Vahan holds a PhD degree equivalent in Applied Mathematics and is an avid chess player.

Harley Semple, Director Data Solutions,Options Technology.
Harley began her career at CME Group’s Belfast hub working in analytics before moving to Options in 2019 where she has since worked with global financial clients in Singapore, Dublin, London, and New York. As an integral member of the Options M&A team throughout several acquisitions Harley spearheaded the market data synergies integration globally. As Director of Data Solutions Harley has made her career from pushing the boundaries to optimize and innovate the Options product offering and processes in a quest ensure their clients’ stay ahead of the curve with efficient and cutting-edge solutions.

Adam Sherer, Verification Technology Executive, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Adam drives verification software and hardware sales in Eastern North America with 31 years of experience in verification and software engineering. He is also secretary of the Accellera IP Security Assurance standard working group and often presents on security verification. Adam received his MS EE from the University of Rochester, with research published in the IEEE Transactions on CAD. His BS EE and BA CS were received from SUNY Buffalo. He also holds a 2017 patent in verification technology.

Dr. David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David is currently Director of Engineering at Arista Networks. He was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, which was acquired by Arista in 2018. 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.

Joe Steiner, Global CTO of Financial Services, UDS Division, Dell Technologies.
Joe joined UDS in 2010 after 20 years in the Financial Services industry (FSI). Joe held leadership positions at Bank of America, NationsBank and G.E. Capital. Since 2010 his focus has been to drive continued adoption of PowerScale, Isilon and ECS as the best scale-out file and object platforms to solve enterprise challenges facing Dell’s largest customers. Joe is working with Dell’s top global customers to help define their next generation business & technology transformations – covering automation, data protection, governance, software-defined file and object storage, converged infrastructure and empowering data driven business value!

Daniel Wisehart, FPGA & ASIC Engineer.
Daniel began trading professionally in 1993 and worked on his first FPGA and ASIC designs in 1997. He has worked for 10 different trading firms in all of the electronically tradable asset classes with differing latency needs. He has designed FPGA and ASIC solutions for both trading and hardware design shops. He has designed and built systems that split trading applications into a mixture of hardware and software to create systems that meet the needed latency profiles. He holds FINRA series 57 and series 24 registrations.