Speaker Biographies – Chicago, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Venkat Doddapuneni, Senior Director of Software Engineering, CME Group.
Venkat is a Senior Director of Software Engineering at the CME and has spent his career improving technology in financial services. He has extensive experience in product design, development, and delivery, as well as the creation of low-latency, high-performing, and resiliency fintech applications across trading, clearing, and regulatory services. Prior to his current role at the CME, he spent time at UBS, Polaris Financial Services, and Genpact Headstrong Capital Markets.

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.

Marc Gale, Director of Data Engineering, OncoHealth; former Manager of Data Engineering, Chicago Trading Company
Marc has spent the last 20 years working in the hedge fund space, including Citadel and CTC, holding leadership positions in a variety of data, analytics and operations roles. Recently he decided to apply the lessons learned in finance to a new domain as the Director of Data Engineering at OncoHealth, a Health Care firm. Marc has a degree in Mathematics from Carleton College.

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.

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.

Vrashank Jain, Sr. Director, Product Management, Dell Technologies.
Vrashank is a Product lead in the Future of IT org at Dell where he focuses on both product management and strategic partnerships in the enterprise data space. Previously, he spent 8 years in strategy consulting in Dell’s Corporate Strategy group and an external consulting firm. He holds a Comp Sci Engineering degree from BIT Mesra, India, and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He loves trivia, music and soccer.

Josh Kalina, Sales Engineer, KX.
Josh is a former Marine and veteran that has spent his career working in the intersection of finance and technology. Life has gifted him with two incredible moments over the last two years in becoming a proud dog father and most recently a proud father to his first [human] son. While balancing work and family, he also enjoys finding time to indulge his hobbies of food through cooking and travel. My wife also says I play too many video games.

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.

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.

Pramod Nayak, Director of Product Management, Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Pramod is the Director of Product Management in the Low Latency Group of LSEG. He focusses on the software, data, and platform products for the low-latency market data industry. Pramod is a former software engineer and passionate about market data and quantitative trading. Prior to LSEG, Pramod was a Software Engineer at MayStreet, and Tradeweb Markets, a fixed-income and derivatives trading platform.

John Nishikawa, Director of Solutions & Technology Alliances, Dell Technologies.
John is the Director of Business Development & Solutions for the UDS Division of Dell Technologies. Over 20-years in the technology (mainly data storage) leading sales, business development and strategic alliances for EMC, Qlogic, Brocade, Isilon, and now at Dell Technologies. At UDS, John has a team of vertical subject matter experts that span M&E, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Energy, EDA, Auto/ADAS, Manufacturing as well as horizontal workloads like Surveillance, Analytics, AI, and Enterprise IT Backup & Archive. John is based in the San Francisco Bay area and has Social Science degree from UC Irvine and an MBA from San Diego State University.

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.

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.

Alex Stein, Global Head Business Development, Liquid-Markets-Solutions.
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.