Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Spring 2023

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.

Jeff Caldwell, Head of Information Technology, ARB TG.
Jeff graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Music Therapy in 1991. He moved to Chicago and started his career at the Alzheimer’s Family Care Center as a music therapist. During his 10-year tenure at the AFCC, he earned his MS in Health Law and Administration from DePaul University and moved into the position of Network Administer. In 1998, RUSH Medical Center hired him as the Network Administrator/Financial Manager. Jeff moved to finance in 2000 with GHCO. He worked his way up over 15 years as the FCM changed names 6 times, starting as a Systems Administrator and becoming the VP of IT at Wedbush Futures. ARB Trading Group hired Jeff in 2016 as the Head of IT. He brings many years of futures industry expertise.

Matt Certosimo, Data Center FPGA Field Application Engineer, AMD.
Matt has over 12 years of experience working with FPGAs. 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.

Josh Chou, Solutions Consultant - Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Josh is a skilled solutions consultant with a deep expertise in the field of market data. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, Josh has become a sought-after professional renowned for his comprehensive knowledge and problem-solving abilities. Recently, he joined LSEG Low Latency Data as part of their team, providing support to the AMERS region. Joining LSEG Low Latency Data has provided Josh with an exciting opportunity to contribute to the AMERS region's financial landscape. His role involves leveraging his extensive knowledge of market data to support clients in optimizing their trading operations.

Paula Clarke, Senior Presales Engineer, KX.
Paula has worked in the financial services industry as a kdb+ developer for more than six years. As a senior presales engineer, she works across various projects with the latest tech and is looking forward to helping organizations make sense of their data using KX’s unparalleled technology. Paula has lived in New York for the past 5 years and when she isn’t working, you’ll find her going for a run through New York’s wonderful parks or playing some kind of sport!

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.

Kevin Formby, VP Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies.
Kevin, after an ‘explosive’ career as a weapons systems engineer, has worked in telecommunications industry in both the UK and USA. Over the last 25 years he has had roles in several FinTech companies including senior management positions in BT Radianz. More recently he was CEO of the data networking company Datacom Systems. He is now VP of Finance and Capital Markets for Keysight, and is responsible for over all strategy, M&A, customer engagement, and sales to capital markets. He lives in Austin, Texas (though he still retains his native northern England accent). In addition to his corporate career, he is very interested in transportation history and recently published his own non-fiction book about railroads in Texas.

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.

Alex Gonzalez, Machine Learning/Deep Learning Solutions Engineer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Alex is part of HPE’s HPC & AI Solutions Organization focusing on scalable high-performance infrastructure that supports Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. He supports enterprises across Manufacturing, FSI, and the Service Provider space. He is from Dallas/Fort Worth & he enjoys spoiling his only child, a 4 year old yellow labrador named Belle.

Rob Glanzman, Global Strategic Alliances Principal Architect, Financial Services, Pure Storage.
25+ year veteran of the Cloud and Data industry. 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. He currently leads Pure's Financial Services Vertical world-wide.

Dr. Christoph Lameter, Senior IT Expert, Deutsche Boerse.
Dr. Lameter is a technology leader at the Deutsche Boerse AG, working to stabilize the server communication fabric. He designed the architecture and migration path from Infiniband to high-speed ethernet, developed RDMA software, enhanced the Linux kernel, and was involved with key vendors to enable the seamless and reliable operation of major electronic trading venues. Previously, he created leading HPC and trading infrastructures with cutting-edge technology as the Technical Lead of Research and Development at Jump Trading. As an Open Source community leader since the early '90s, he's had roles in key organizations (Debian, Linux International, Linux Foundation, OpenFabrics Alliance). Christoph was Principal Engineer for Kernel Development at Silicon Graphics, where they developed key Linux kernel components to enable HPC technology. Christoph, still active in development, maintains two Linux kernel subsystems.

David Lariviere, Clinical Professor of Financial Engineering (MSFE program), University of Illinois.
David is a professor at the University of Illinois for the Master of Science in Financial Engineering (MSFE) program; he has many brilliant and hard-working students that are extremely interested in employment. He previously taught in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments at Columbia University in NYC, teaching FPGA development for DMA/HFT. Simultaneously, he served as the Head of Advanced Technologies for GTS, leading software and hardware optimization teams and the CME futures related trading infrastructure. He was then the lead consultant overseeing the roll-out of CME’s Market Segment Gateway (MSGW) project and author of the “latency tricks patent”.

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.

Mike McLaughlin, Sr. Systems Engineer, Vast Data.
Mike McLaughlin brings 15+ years of experience in storage system design and deployment. With an MBA from the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, he combines technical proficiency with business acumen. Mike is passionate about leveraging innovative technologies for optimized storage infrastructure.

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, 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.

Satya Pandey, CTO, Investment Banking division, William Blair.
At William Blair, Satya is at the forefront of driving business growth and transformation through the strategic implementation of AI and advanced engineering solutions. Previously, Satya demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit by founding and leading a real estate technology start-up, offering an AI-powered mobile app to assist first-time home sellers in making informed financial decisions. Satya has held various engineering and technology roles at prestigious organizations, including Goldman Sachs and Deloitte Consulting, continually showcasing his expertise and passion for innovation. He holds an MS in Applied Data Science from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Technology in Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, India.

Prabhu Ramamoorthy, CFA, FRM, CAIA, Customer/Partner Developer Relationship Manager, NVIDIA.
Prabhu is the financial ecosystem partner manager at NVIDIA, He focuses on HPC/ML/AI acceleration for financial services. Previously, he held leadership roles as the head of technology of a margin software firm Dash Regtech, catering to leading investment banks and broker-dealers and served in leadership roles at Big Four firm KPMG/EY as a director in financial services practice, where he helped 80+ financial institutions over the last 10 years. Prabhu holds an MBA from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an undergraduate engineering degree from BITS-Pilani. He is a CFA charterholder, Financial Risk Manager (FRM), and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), specializing in financial use cases.

Zachary Richards, Team Lead, Cloud Architecture and Technology Services, DRW.
At DRW, Zachary leads the team responsible for cloud infrastructure and enablement. In his current role, Zachary and his team help drive cloud adoption across DRW’s various business units. Prior to DRW, Zachary held various positions at Inspire 11, Mesirow Advanced Strategies, and CME Group. Zachary holds a BA in Psychology, and an MS in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

Alastair Richardson, Strategic Business Development Director, Data Center and Communications Group, AMD.
Alastair’s has over 18 years of experience in the global fintech markets. A unique front to back perspective having had roles in trading, product, sales and technology roles at JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Barclays as well as several Fintech start-ups including Fixnetix and Metamako. Alastair now runs Global Business Development for Financial Technology at AMD.

Michael Rothenberg, Global UDS Business Development, Financial Trading & Energy, Dell Technologies.
At Dell, Michael manages global business development across the financial services, energy, and HPC sectors for the Unstructured Data Solutions division. Prior to joining Dell, Michael helped make investment decisions in the VC group of NextEra as the lead for technology and commercialization strategy. In his career he has used a variety of AI/ML algorithms on topics including energy trading, scheduling, and hedging engines (power, oil, NG), EVs, smart meters, satellite imagery, robotics, customer outcomes, and HR to name a few. Michael is a practitioner at heart and loves a good conversation around your AI challenges.

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 Design Systems.
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.

Dave Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista Networks.
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.

Tom Stephens, CEO, Techary.
Tom founded Techary in 2012, initially as a London-based Managed Services Provider. Since then, he has led Techary's global growth, expanding the company's services across all key global markets. Techary now offers an extensive portfolio of technology services, including Managed Services, Procurement, Resources, and Project Services. Tom is passionate about innovation and using technology to improve customer experience. His main focus is solving problems to ultimately make a positive impact on customers. Tom's experience includes leading the business through multiple growth stages, building a global operation, and managing relationships with key customers and partners.

James Watson, Head of Platform Engineering, Adaptive.
James is the Head of Platform Engineering at Adaptive, overseeing the engineering of Adaptive's product suite, including Agrona, SBE, Artio, and Aeron. James graduated with a first-class degree in Computer Science from the University of York in 2009. Since then, he has built up more than 14 years of experience specializing in low-latency trading systems both on-prem and in the cloud. He has led the development and delivery of multiple trading venues built on the Aeron, maintains the .NET port of Aeron, and enjoys playing rugby in his spare time. .