Speaker Biographies – London, Fall 2022

Michael Bauer, Technical Pre-Sales Director, BSO.
Mike joined BSO in 2014 and played a key role in the development of the Pre-Sales team. Its mission is to direct the activities of pre-sales engineers, to improve the international network of BSO, and to research and recommend technical solutions to meet the needs of our customers. After 20 years of experience at BT Radianz as a pre-sales engineer, he joined BSO. He is a highly motivated, dedicated, and respected member of his team. Mike holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Manchester. He is passionate about sailing and canoeing. He is bilingual in English and German.

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.

James Coomer, Sr. Vice President Products, DDN.
James is responsible for the technology direction, roadmap and performance analysis of DDN solutions. His main tasks include engaging with, and understanding the issues of organizations that are exploring the extremes of IO performance across industries from Life Sciences through to Finance with use cases from Cloud, Enterprise Big Data to HPC. James’ career started with a PhD in Theoretical Physics followed by over 10 years at Sun Microsystems and Dell, in a wide range of roles from L3 support through consultancy, training, installation and pre-sales. James turned to focus on IO and storage in a move to DDN in 2011.

Olivier Cousin, System Architect, AMD.
Olivier is a System Architect at AMD responsible for all Fintech related solutions from library definition to low latency trading platform specifications. Prior to that, Olivier worked in the High-Level Synthesis group at Intel developing the first FPGA Financial library. Olivier also worked as a front office quantitative developer accelerating trading platforms at RBS. He holds a master’s in digital Electronic and parallel processing systems and the Certificate of Quantitative Finance from the FitLearning institute.

Declan Cragg, Technical Marketing Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Declan is an engineer focused on creating, optimising and delivering demos and proof-of-concepts showcasing Intel technologies, across hardware and software. Declan provides AI/ML/DL support for multiple customer accounts in Europe, evangelising Intel's range of optimised toolkits for accelerating workloads. Declan enjoys solving customer problems and showing what's possible with a technology through real use cases. Declan has a BEng (Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from University of Bath.

Amr El-Ashmawi, VP Vertical Markets, Groq.
Amr is the Vice President of Marketing, Verticals and Partnerships at Groq, an AI accelerator that provides software-driven solutions for real-time AI, ML, and HPC applications. Amr specializes in the financial services, cybersecurity, enterprise communications, and US government verticals. Amr previously worked in marketing leadership positions at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (acquired by Infineon), Microsemi Corporation (acquired by Microchip), and Altera (acquired by Intel).

Ehud Fishler, Head of Technology, Raft Technologies .
Ehud has earned his BSc. from the Technion - Israel in 1993 and his MSc. and PhD in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University in 2007. He was the founder of Mantissa LTD, a first of its kind miniaturized radar devices for unique defense applications. He is also a cofounder of Anachoic – LTD, an innovative smart helmet for two-wheelers that makes use of tiny mm-wave radar sensors. In his present capacity, Ehud serves as the Head of Technology in Raft-Technologies, leading innovative solution of ultra low-latency HF signaling.

Pierre Gardrat, CTO, NovaSparks.
Pierre joined NovaSparks in 2010 as Hardware VP Engineering. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Pierre worked in the FPGA development industry for seven years, starting his career in the French Department of Homeland Security and then serving as firmware developer and application engineer at EVE, a leader of FPGA-based emulation acquired in 2012 by Synopsys. Pierre graduated from Telecom Paristech (ENST Paris) and holds an MSc from University of Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris.

Conor Gervin, Partnerships Engineering Lead, KX.
Connor is Partner Engineering Lead at KX and has spent the past decade working with various Tier-1 Investment Banks and Hedge Funds in NYC as a kdb+ engineer. Now back in his homeland of Ireland, Connor is passionate when working with disruptive technologies and customers and plays a strategic role within the KX Partnerships organisation to bring the value of high-performance time-series analysis to market through the cloud hyper-scalers.

Iain Kenney, Sr. Director & Head of Product Management, cPacket.
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.

James Laming, VP, Global Head of Infrastructure, Options Technology.
James Laming is Vice President & Global Head of Infrastructure for Options Technology the leading global financial markets service provider. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s technical strategy, design, development, and delivery of cutting-edge platforms. Technical founder and visionary of the Options Data Platform, Cloud Services suites, and Perfect 4 Pod’ular architecture. Prior roles in R&D have cultivated a fanatical attitude to Architect, a Data First Evangelist, and closet storage-geek. James is a proven leader and technologist with more than 20 years of global cross-platform designing and management experience with some of the most demanding high-performance platforms.

Rob Lane, Global Head of Business Execution, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Rob has worked in the financial markets for over 20 years, with a focus on market data and trading infrastructure within the low latency space. He started his career in sales and subsequently has held various global management roles covering product, proposition and business management. He now leads the business execution of our new low latency business, which offers low latency feed handers and global PCAP data to help power and support electronic trading applications.

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.

Peter Lawrey, Founder & CEO, Chronicle Software.
Peter founded Chronicle Software in 2013 as he saw great demand for low-latency Java within electronic trading. Chronicle Software has since become a trusted partner to Tier 1 Banks, Hedge Funds, Crypto Currency Exchanges and Traders. The Chronicle Open Source Software is downloaded 24m+ times pa and used across industries ranging from Payments, Biometric Research to Gaming Consoles by companies such as Apple and Paypal. Peter is a global leading expert, Java Champion and has held senior consultancy positions for global financial institutions including RBS, Barclays, UBS and Reuters. Peter continues to innovative ways to utilise Java within low-latency microservices.

Mark Lucas, EMEA Director of Systems Engineer, WEKA.
Mark has had a fast-paced career which included working for Electronic Data Systems, Data Direct Networks, Network Appliance, BlueArc, Virident and Quantum before joining WEKA. His first job was working on BSD Unix Apollo workstations and Sun SPARC Unix servers writing various applications in C with the key goal of designing and building some of the first fast large scale automated data collection and data mining applications. Mark’s career has since evolved to working on various cloud AI projects and multi-Petabyte large customer accounts. These customer projects leverage GPU's, fast shared access file systems and object storage technologies in their pipeline workflows.

Graham McKenzie, Senior Field Applications Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Graham is passionate about technology and with a career spanning 30 years in FPGA design and support, has helped customers enable new products and capabilities across a myriad of applications. He specializes in the adoption of FPGA and associated system architecture to accelerate application and infrastructure workloads in the data center, for cloud and enterprise across EMEA and beyond. Graham has a BEng Hons degree in Electronic Engineering from De Montfort University, Leicester and worked as an Electronics Design Engineer before taking an FAE role at Altera (now Intel) in 2001.

Dr. Gareth Morris, FPGA Team Lead, hedge fund.
Gareth completed his PhD in high performance FPGA arithmetic at Imperial College in 2006. Since then he has had long tenures at high frequency trading shops and vendors such as Celoxica, Novasparks, and Liquid Capital. He currently leads the FPGA development team at a London-based hedge fund.

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.

Michael O’Sullivan, Engineering Director, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Michael is an engineering director at Cadence with a focus on verification and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Michael has been with Cadence for over 24 years with various roles in sales, marketing and design services. Prior to Cadence he was a design Engineer at the S3 Group in Dublin, Ireland and at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Michael has an M.Eng. Sc from the National University of Ireland.

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.

Alex Stein, Global Head Business Development, Liquid-Markets-Holdings.
Alex is a serial entrepreneur having cofounded and led four startups including FarSight Financial Services, the first Internet brokerage and Gomez, Inc, the leading Internet Performance Management company. Alex was a Managing Director at Two Sigma; while he was there he built the firm’s global Alpha Capture program, which applies quantitative research to identify and extract investment signals in real time from a global network of investment professionals. He also co-led the Client Solutions platform, Venn, and explored emerging technologies, including blockchain and distributed ledger systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at Digital Equipment's VLSI facility in the Advanced Development group. Stein received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1991) and both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Dartmouth College.

Anthony Warden, Global Head of High Performance Architectures, Citigroup.
Anthony has over 25 years of experience in technology for algorithmic trading and direct market access. Anthony is currently building a new organisation named "High Performance Architectures." The goal is to industrialise the development of low latency frameworks and tooling, and provide managed adoption of these in Citi's wider Markets and ICG Technology organisations to accelerate application modernisation. Anthony is the visionary and driver behind an in-house low-latency microservices framework and is a change agent and thought leader for the architecture, design, and delivery of flagship platform transformation programmes. Anthony is on a Citi patent application for a new approach to monitoring low latency platforms.

Jason White, Director of Market Data Solutions, Exegy.
Jason has over 15 years of experience leading engineering and managed services efforts at Exegy. He currently leads Exegy’s product management team, responsible for product strategy, architecture, and roadmap planning. Jason is an original member of Exegy’s engineering team and is an inventor on many United States and international patents. Previously, he has also served in key roles leading Exegy’s Managed Service Operations and Managed Services Engineering teams.

Tim Wood, Sr. Solution Architect FSI-EMEA, NVIDIA Corporation.
With an academic background in computer systems architecture and computational finance, Tim spent eleven years working in financial markets in banking implementing NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies. Now at NVIDIA, he helps other financial institutions do the same.