Speaker Biographies – New York, Fall 2023

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Strategic 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.

Rich Brown, Data Management Executive.
Rich is a data management executive with more than 20 years’ experience in financial services. Most recently, Rich was the Head of Data Management at Citadel, responsible for the sourcing, procurement, and vendor management for data, research, and expert network services across the enterprise. Rich focuses on managing large scale data operations as well as leveraging technology-based solutions to improve efficiencies, drive cost savings, and discover new alpha generating data. Prior to Citadel, he held a similar role at Schonfeld and spent over a decade creating and managing data products at Thomson Reuters and his consulting firm, Semiotics.

Dr. Luca Carloni, Professor and Chair of Computer Science, Columbia University.
Luca is professor and chair of Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York. He holds a Laurea Degree Summa cum Laude in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include heterogeneous computing, system-on-chip platforms, embedded systems, and open-source hardware. He co-authored over one hundred and eighty refereed papers. Luca received the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the ONR Young Investigator Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Vito Chiarella, Sr. Director, Global Accounts & Datacenter, East Sales, Kioxia.
As a 40-year semiconductor industry veteran, Vito has led many teams in Sales, Engineering and Account Development in product areas of ASIC, Optics, Display and Memory technologies with major OEM’s in Mobile, Networking, Server and Storage systems.

Jeff Chu, Financial Services Sales, Penguin Solutions.
Jeff is Senior Sales Director at Penguin Solutions managing the Financial Services vertical. Penguin has sold and delivered some of the largest AI factories in the world, with over 50,000 GPUs under management. Jeff enjoys helping customers succeed with their initiatives on large scale GPU clusters and driving business value using the latest technology from Penguin’s partners. Prior to joining Penguin, Jeff enjoyed success at EMC, CA, Hitachi, Infinidat, and Pavilion. He has specialized in leading and building sales teams that provide material benefit to new and existing customers. A graduate of Rutgers University, Jeff resides in New Jersey.

Dave Clack, Chief Product Officer, Adaptive.
Dave is Chief Product Officer at Adaptive which he joined in 2015 as a non-executive board advisor. He has a wealth of experience in software consulting, PMO leadership, process optimization, software methodologies, and successful orchestration of substantial development projects. Previous roles include leadership positions at Quantum, the data services company, and LMAX where he was Head of Technology Delivery. Most recently, Clack led CatDV, a media management business, steering its revenue growth until its acquisition.

David Cohen, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Dave is a Senior Principal Engineer and Storage Solutions CTO for the Data Center Solutions Group (DSG), a unit within Intel’s Data Center Group. He focuses on designing solutions that exploit Intel’s 3D-Xpoint Memory technology to its fullest while taking advantage of centrally-managed software in order to operate large-scale, distributed systems. Prior to Intel, David was a Director in the Office of the CTO at EMC where he lead efforts related to integrating storage systems with network virtualization. David also has a long-history of working on building distributed systems in industry, most recently working for the investment banks: Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. An experienced practitioner, Dave's active connections to commercial and academic research and development labs insure Intel’s Storage Solutions are both well-grounded and cutting-edge. An acknowledged industry expert in system architecture and development, Dave is a sought after speaker and published author.

Liz Corrigan, Head of Engineering, Myrtle.ai.
Liz runs Myrtle.ai’s engineering operations. Liz has been running teams to create FPGA based products and systems for over 15 years. She has developed state of the art mobile telecommunications equipment, shipped defence systems into theatre and led verification activities for security critical applications. Liz is a Chartered Engineer with a technical background in RTL design, verification and electronic systems design.

Matthew Cretney, Head of Product Management, Beeks Group.
An experienced technologist with two decades of working in FinTech, infrastructure and network analytics, with most of those years spent with Reuters/Refinitiv. At Thomson Reuters he was the technical product lead for Refinitiv’s SaaS multi-tenant white-labelled FX eTrading capability and oversaw the development of Refinitiv’s FX Spot and Forwards Matching services. At Beeks, Matt heads up Product Management where the focus is on bringing cloud agility to the financial markets and improving business visibility of their underlying infrastructure performance.

Tom Crimi, CTO, Quantbot Technologies.
Tom has been at Quantbot Technologies for 14 years, working on quant strategies and leading many technology projects from teasing out low level tick-to-trade latency improvements to building a data and job distribution platform to allow the firm's research teams to leverage multiple cloud and on-premises environments seamlessly. Prior to algorithmic trading he started his career in the EDA industry focusing on ASIC timing analysis and optimization. He holds an MS in ECE from Carnegie Mellon University.

Laurent de Barry, Sr. Director, Global Head of Solutions Consulting, 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.

Robert DeWitt, Director Product Marketing, AMD.
Robert leads product marketing for Fintech in the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Robert oversees marketing, product development and strategy. Prior to his current role, Robert was at Cisco where he was senior leader in the Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group (CISG), a technical sales specialist group, focused entirely on Ultra Low Latency networking. Upon Cisco’s acquisition of Exablaze, Robert lead the global Technical Solution Architect team wherein he influenced product roadmaps of switches, SmartNICs, and software/firmware. Robert spent a total of 18 years with Cisco. Prior to Cisco, Robert held global sales/engineering leadership roles at Exablaze (a provider of FPGA based SmartNICs and switches), Tradebot (High Frequency Trading firm) and Arista Networks.

Seth Friedman, CEO, Liquid-Markets-Solutions.
As CEO of LMS, Seth is responsible for product vision. He has been an active leader at the forefront of electronic trading for over 23 years, with deep sales-trading, technology, and consulting experience. His history of technology vision includes the invention of a multi-patented FPGA order processing technology proven in the field since 2010. Seth headed Program Trading at Morgan Stanley Japan before establishing the Electronic Trading Services business, which he expanded throughout Asia. At Nomura, Seth established the Quantitative Prime Services business, played a key role in the post-acquisition integration of Lehman Brothers, and was responsible for Electronic Product Management across Asia.

Jean-François Gagnon, Ultra-Low Latency FPGA Solutions Architect, Orthogone.
Jean-François holds the Ultra-Low Latency FPGA Solutions Architect position at Orthogone Technologies. He graduated as an electrical engineer from École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1992 and is a member of the Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ). Before joining Orthogone, he worked in the high-tech industry with large companies such as Nortel Networks and Ciena Corporation. Over the last 25 years, his experience with several start-ups in Canada has allowed him to acquire solid expertise in developing telecommunication solutions, specifically with FPGAs.

Michael Galime, Director - Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies.
Mike is part of Keysight’s team which focuses on solutions directed at exchanges, investment banks, and the overall finance industry, with added focus on the integrity of market data and its access in the cloud. Based in NY, Mike was responsible for the development of TradeView, the first packet broker to feature in-built FPGA based multicast gap detection, and enjoys putting the garnered financial markets expertise to use within Keysight’s Finance industry solutions team. Mike, who previously worked as an Air Force contractor in the field of Bayesian and causal analysis, has a background in music and entertainment to fill his time outside the technology community.

Robert Glanzman, Global Strategic Alliances Principal Architect, Financial Services, Pure Storage.
25+ year veteran of the Cloud and Data industry. Rob currently leads Pure's Financial Services Vertical world-wide. At VMware, Rob was a founder of VxRail, the world’s leading Hyper-converged Infrastructure Appliance and multi-billion-dollar run rate business for Dell | EMC. He also co-founded and led VMware’s Global Innovation Incubator xLabs in the Office of the CTO. Prior to that Rob managed the VMware / EMC relationship for all Global Financial Accounts and architected some of the largest storage and virtualized environments in existence at the time. Rob also worked in various engineering and executive positions at AT&T and Morgan Stanley.

Ramon Gonzalez, Head of Technology Operations, IEX.
Ramon is the Head of Technology Operations for IEX Group, Inc. Since 2013, he has held various roles across their tech ecosystem, currently overseeing the teams responsible for Group technology operations. A hands-on leader, you’ll find Ray touching everything from tech stack strategy, to development, and data center operations, to dabbling in HVAC, building design and maintenance for fun. Prior to IEX, Ray held systems reliability engineer and administrator roles with organizations like the ERFD, Nasdaq, Prudential Financial, and Lehman Brothers. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in IT Network Security from New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Mark Guerrera, UDS Global Field CTO, Object Storage, Dell Technologies.
Mark is the Global Field CTO in the Unstructured Solutions Group, focused on Object Storage at Dell Technologies. Mark is a 20 year EMC veteran and brings over 25 years of experience in Pre-Sales Systems Engineering in Networking, Storage and Virtualization. Mark has focused on Object storage for the last ten years at Dell and led the Global Pre-Sales team that helped launch Atmos and then ECS to the market. Mark brings a unique blend of application and storage level insights to help IT deliver next-generation solutions to their internal and external customers. This not only includes Object Storage but the broader Dell Technologies storage and virtualization portfolio.

Troy Kaster, Vice President of AI, Penguin Solutions.
Troy Kaster is Vice President of Generative AI at Penguin Solutions. Penguin designs, builds, integrates, and manages customized end-to-end technology solutions to address the specific needs of Fortune 500 companies, financial services companies, academic institutions, startups, and public sector institutions. Troy has sold and delivered some of the largest AI factories in the world, with over 50,000 GPUs under management. Troy prides himself on his ability to apply technology to solve a wide array of customer problems, leveraging AI/ML solutions to solve real word problems and provide business value at scale. A graduate of Algonquin College, Troy resides in Arizona.

Ciaran Kennedy, Sales, Safran.
Ciaran is a seasoned executive with over 20 years experience bridging the gap between business requirements and technology. With a proven record of delivering solutions directly to clients in the fast moving and demanding financial services sector his experiences range from architecting trading platforms to operating businesses with evidence of delivering to stakeholder expectations to the ability to get hands-on with technology.

Peter Kohler, SVP - Global Head of Presales, KX.
Worked in the finance and data industry for over 20 years after serving as an Officer in the US Navy as a Gunnery Officer, Nuclear Engineer and Officer Instructor. Began my post military career as a DBA and have spent time leading teams in data management, governance and regulatory management, anti-money laundering, wealth, pricing and reference services, and real time across a wide range of industries with a specific focus in finance.

Nick Lange, Specialized Electronic Trading Infrastructure, Morgan Stanley.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklange/

Michael Lehr, Head of Technology, Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Michael is the Head of Technology for the Low Latency Group of LSEG. He runs the software development teams for all products delivered in the group. Michael is a Software Developer and still contributes on a regular basis. Prior to LSEG Michael was a Co-Founder and CTO of MayStreet Inc and a developer at Sumo Trading. Michael has also worked in the field of Computer Vision with Organic Motion, Sarnoff, and Lockheed Martin. He received a BA in Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive Science from University of Rochester, and a MS in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania.

Darrin Machay, Principal Engineer, Arista.
Darrin helps design and support Arista’s 7130 series of L1/FPGA systems. With a background in trading and 14 years of experience in low latency networking, he’s responsible for next-generation platform architecture and product development. Prior to joining Arista, he built high-performance networks and FPGA applications for proprietary trading firms in Chicago. Darrin holds an MS in Financial Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University.

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.

Keith Miller, VP 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, Strategic 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.

Chris Porthouse, Chief Product Officer, Salience Labs.
Chris is CPO at Salience Labs, and previously 3 years as CPO for Imagination Technologies, and GM and VP at Arm. He has a background in GPU, AI and CPU products for mobile, consumer, automotive, IoT and data center markets.

Hamid Reza Salehi, Director Product Marketing, AMD.
Hamid leads the data center product marketing team at Adaptable and Embedded Compute Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Hamid oversees marketing, product development and strategy. Prior to his current role, Hamid founded a startup in the IOT space, and worked at Marvell Semiconductor, Broadcom, T-Mobile, and Radio Frequency Systems (Alcatel-Lucent) in various roles, including product management, business development, analytics, and finance. Hamid received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of waterloo and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Martin Rowe, Sr. Application Engineer, Siemens.
Martin is a Sr. Application Engineer specializing in formal verification, working with sales, marketing, and R&D to ensure the successful adoption of solutions in the customer’s verification flows and methodologies. Martin has a Master’s degree of Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota.

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.

Adam Sherer, Verification Technology Executive, Cadence.
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.

Tom Spencer, Business Development and Marketing Professional, Intel Corporation.
Tom is a seasoned marketing and business development executive with 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. While holding positions from start-ups to large fortune 500 companies, he has been responsible for multiple product launches for silicon-based compute, networking and storage solutions in mainstream markets such as Telecommunication, Data Center, Cloud, Storage and Enterprise. He is also well-versed in go-to-market strategy creation and product messaging and positioning.