Speaker Biographies – New York, Spring 2023

Hunter Almgren, Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Hunter currently serves as a Distinguished Technologist in the Americas at HPE. Hunter has a deep technical background in compute and storage technologies from major solution providers. He specializes in high performance computing, advanced data analytics, multi-cloud architectures, and developing global infrastructure standards. Hunter has also helped build and manage POC labs and mixed solution datacenter environments.

Ioana Boier, Senior Principal Applied Researcher and Solutions Architect, NVIDIA.
Ioana is a senior principal applied researcher and solutions architect at NVIDIA. Her background is in Quantitative Finance and Computer Science. Prior to joining Nvidia, she built an extensive people and thought leadership track record at Alphadyne, Citadel LLC, BNP Paribas, and IBM T.J. Watson Research. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. She is the author of over 30 peer-reviewed publications, 15 patents, and the winner of several awards for applied research delivered into products used by clients worldwide.

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. 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.

John Chan, Director of Technology – AI/ML, Raymond James Financial.
John is a Director of Technology at Raymond James Financial running the Carillon Labs - the innovation labs specialized in AI/ML. His passion is to promote AI adoptions and implement machine learning solutions in Financial Sector. He has 20+ years experience leading and implementing technology solutions from FinTech startups to top-tier banks and consulting firms. Prior to Raymond James, John was an AI strategist and engineering lead at Gamma Lab of OneConnect Financial, Morgan Stanley data science team and KPMG Cognitive Technology Lab. He is active in NLP research focusing on Generative AI, Conversational AI, Document Understanding and risk and compliance technology.

Cam Colella, Head of Technology, Flow Traders US.
At Flow Traders, Cam represents Technology on the global Executive Committee and oversees Technology in the Americas. He is responsible for global technology strategy, innovation, and architecture. Prior to his current role, Cam was both Head of Trading Performance and a Trader.

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.

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.

Charles Fan, CEO and co-founder, MemVerge.
Charles is co-founder and CEO of MemVerge. Prior to MemVerge, Charles was the CTO of Cheetah Mobile leading its global technology teams, and an SVP/GM at VMware, founding the storage business unit that developed the Virtual SAN product. Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of the EMC China R&D Center. Charles joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity, where he was a co-founder and CTO. Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.

Patrick Flannery, Group Leader, Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
With over 15 years in the financial technology space, Patrick has unparalleled experience in building advanced technology for highly scalable low-latency market data applications in equities and derivatives markets. Patrick was the Chief Executive Officer of MayStreet, a firm he co-founded in 2012. With the acquisition of MayStreet by LSEG, Patrick is now Group Leader- Low Latency, within the Enterprise Data Solutions group. Prior to founding MayStreet, Patrick was the Director of Engineering at NYC-based equity options market maker, Sumo Capital. Before that, he was a Senior Engineer at Volant Trading, a multi-asset proprietary trading firm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Gorbovitski, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley.
Michael has been in the technologically fast-paced and ultra-low-latency business of Automated Options Market Making for the last decade. Before that, he was a founder of several startups in the biotech and bioinformatics sectors, while also maintaining advisory board positions in medical AI and remote learning startups. He got his PhD in Computer Science in 2010 in New York, Stony Brook, with multiple papers published in the fields of Computer Science as well as Biotechnology, as well as several patents. He is a practicing member of the ACM.

Dr. Prabhanjan (Anju) Kambadur, Head of AI Engineering, Bloomberg.
Dr. Prabhanjan (Anju) Kambadur is the Head of the AI Engineering group at Bloomberg, which consists of 250+ researchers and engineers responsible for building financial solutions using technologies from ML, NLP, IR, Dialog, Speech, Vision, Optimization, and Time Series Analysis. Some of the products the AI Group helps build include News, Research, Communications, and Finance. The members of his group are active in the academic community and have published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers since 2021. Anju is an author of the recently published BloombergGPT paper. Before Bloomberg, Anju was a senior researcher at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights.

Joel Kaufman, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, WEKA.
For the last 25+ years Joel has worked in tech including several startups, then SGI, HP and then 20+ years with NetApp focused on performance, application integration, manageability, and virtualization/containerization of applications. For the last several years at WEKA, Joel has been focused on how we can integrate with customer environments to bring value into their high-performance data pipelines and processes.

Iain Kenney, Sr. Director & Head of Product Management, cPacket Networks.
Iain leads Product Management at cPacket Networks. His current role allows Iain to partner with the highly experienced engineering team at cPacket based in San Jose and Portland and the product management team to drive the product direction across the suite of cPackets industry leading products. Iain holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Dundee University.

Jack Kiernan, Senior Presales Engineer, KX.
Jack is based in New York and has spent more than six years at KX designing and developing systems for the world’s largest financial services organizations – purposefully built to gain deep real-time insight and powered by the unparalleled speed and efficiency of kdb+ database technology.

Sean Laurens, Head of Engineering, US, Adaptive.
Shaun serves as the Head of Engineering at Adaptive’s US office, holding dual responsibilities within the company. He oversees Adaptive’s Java Practice in the consulting division and is also a member of the platform team, with a primary focus on Aeron. With 25 years of experience in distributed systems, Shaun has worked across the financial services and energy trading sectors across Europe and the US, including roles in the front office and risk. He has successfully led the development and delivery of multiple trading venues built on the Aeron. And if you’re curious about his accent, it’s distinctly South African.

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, 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.

Matthew Nassr, Global Data Engineering Lead, Optiver.
Matt leads Optiver's Global Data Engineering team which is responsible for collecting and transforming large-scale, high-quality datasets globally where users require reliable and pristine datasets to make business decisions.

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.

Bryan Schramm, Senior Sales Engineer, VAST Data.
As a 30+ year veteran of the industry, Bryan is a Senior Systems Engineer at VAST Data supporting large, global financials and HPC customers. Prior to joining VAST Data, Bryan spent 11 years at NetApp as a Senior Solution Architect helping customers with security, data privacy, compliance, and manageability/automation. Before moving to the vendor side, Bryan spent several years as a storage engineer in the financial services and healthcare industries. Spending considerable time on the "customer side", enables Bryan to take a "customer perspective" in truly partnering with his clients to solve real business challenges using a consultative approach.

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.

Nikhil Singhvi, Managing Director of Core Trading Technology, Credit Suisse.
Nikhil is Managing Director responsible for Core Trading Technology at Credit Suisse that includes multi-asset Electronic Client Connectivity, Low Latency Market Data, Trading Analytics, Trading Controls, Execution Links, Client Trading portal and Regulatory Reporting. Prior to joining Credit Suisse in 2010, Nikhil held various Technology management positions covering Front Office Trading, Electronic Trading, Trade Management, Operations, Risk and Finance and has worked across Asia Pacific, Europe and USA. He holds CFA Charter from CFA Institute USA and is a graduate of National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

Dr. David 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.

Kevin Stanton, Sr. Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Kevin drives technology that enhances precision time synchronization for use by distributed applications. Since the mid 2000s he led a re-definition of Intel’s CPU timekeeping, influenced IEEE 1588 co-authored one if its profiles, influenced the expansion of time accuracy in OSes and middleware, and is credited with initiating and driving the Precision Time Measurement (PTM) feature for PCIe interfaces, which is emerging from various Si vendors and addresses time synchronization “in the last centimeters”. Kevin holds a Ph.D. in ECE.

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.

Rakshith Vasudev, Systems Development Engineer, Dell Technologies.
Rakshith is a systems development engineer at the HPC and AI innovation lab at Dell. He works on performance optimization for training, inference for deep learning workloads and benchmarking their behavior. He’s interested in accelerated computing for enabling faster time to solution.