Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Spring 2022

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.

Paul Davy, Technical Account Manager, Arista Networks.
Paul has an extensive background, first working as a runner for R.J. O'Brien before being recruited by the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) as a market reporter. He moved on to pursue his exchange floor training and develop a deep knowledge of Information Systems for Rosenthal Collins Group as a tier 2 trading systems support analyst before landing senior operations analyst roles at the New York Stock Exchange Euronext (NYSE Euronext), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), and XR Trading where he contributed to its high availability electronic trading environment. Paul was Metamako’s first employee before the company was acquired by Arista Networks in 2018.

Kevin Formby, VP, Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies, Inc.
After a career in surface to air missile development, Kevin worked in telecommunications industry for BT and Orange. He was one of the founders of the financial extranet Radianz and after a period with the data-capture company Endace, Kevin became the CEO of the networking company Datacom Systems. In 2014 he joined Keysight Technologies, where he is responsible for the Finance and Capital Markets group. Native from Manchester, England he now lives in Austin, Texas. Outside of work life he has a keen interest in transportation and has recently self-published a book on the history of railroads in and around Austin.

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

Jeff Galloway, Principal, Silicon Creations.
Jeff is a Co-Founder of Silicon Creations (2006), a leading IP provider for ASIC connectivity. He has helped start and grow SERDES product lines along with design centers in Atlanta and Krakow. Before Silicon Creations, he held positions at HP and Agilent Laboratories. His interests include companywide optimization and IC design. He holds an MSEE from Stanford with a specialization in Integrated Circuit Design. He has 12 US patents.

Pete Goddard, CEO, Deephaven Data Labs.
Pete’s a 27-year industry veteran and the founding CEO of two companies. An Aero Engineer, he managed derivatives trading and tech groups at banks and trading shops. In 2005, he founded Walleye, an options market-maker, later diversifying it toward other algo trading. Today it’s a quant fund managing $4 billion. Pete spun out proprietary data software in 2017 and stopped running risk. The system became Deephaven, a general-purpose, real-time-and-batch data framework used by a range of personas for app-dev, AI, analytics, monitoring. Recently, Pete led his engineers to further modularize Deephaven software and deliver it to the open-source community.

Matthew Haraburda, President, XR Trading.
Matt is the President of XR Trading LLC and is responsible for the strategic management and direction of the firm. Matt has more than 25 years of experience in the trading industry, the vast majority of which has been focused on technology in the financial markets. XR Trading is a principal trading firm based in Chicago. Founded in 2002 XR brings efficiency to financial markets with a focus on building highly automated systems.

Nemanja Kamenica, Technical Marketing Engineer – Cloud Networking Team, Cisco Systems.
Nemanja is a Technical Marketing Engineer working on Nexus ultra-low latency solutions with Cisco Date Center Networking group. With over 8 years of experience in the industry, his primary focus is on the Cisco Nexus 3550 and Cisco Nexus SmartNICs product lines, and he has a wide experience with the ASIC and FPGA based switch architecture.

Subramanian Kartik, Vice President of Systems Engineering, VAST Data.
Subramanian Kartik is the Vice President of Systems Engineering at VAST Data, running the global presales organization. He has a wide array of experience in Cloud Architectures, AI/Machine Learning/Deep Learning, high-performance computing and storage. Prior to his work at VAST Data, he was with EMC (later Dell) for two decades, as both a Distinguished Engineer and global executive running the Converged and Hyperconverged Division go-to-market. He has a Ph.D in Particle Physics with over 75 publications and 3 patents to his credit over the years.

Kurt Kuckein, Sr. Vice President of Marketing, DDN.
Kurt is vice president of marketing for DDN, based in Silicon Valley with responsibilities for Product and Corporate Marketing. A storage industry veteran with a particular focus on the needs of advanced computing applications, Kurt joined DDN in 2015 and has held roles in product management and marketing. Prior to joining DDN, he was a product manager for backup and recovery solutions at EMC in the Data Protection Division, ran marketing and product management for the Storage Solutions Group at Silicon Graphics (SGI), and way back when ran special IT projects for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Rochak Lamba, Innovation Program Lead, Head of Capital Markets, Google Cloud.
Rochak is the innovation program lead focussing on capital markets at Google by helping link Google Cloud Platform’s products and solutions with emergent challenges faced by the industry. Before Google, Rochak worked at leading capital markets firms (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and London Stock Exchange Group) in front-office strategist roles systematizing the business. Rochak holds B.E. Software from Sydney, Australia and has a Masters in quantitative finance from London Business School.

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.

John Lockwood, CEO, Algo-Logic Systems.
John is the founder and CEO of Algo-Logic and has over 30 years of experience of mapping algorithms into FPGA logic. He served as a Professor at Stanford University, was tenured at Washington University in Saint Louis, and holds a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. John has engineered high-speed networks for the National Center for Supercomputing Appilcations (NCSA), designed high-speed datalink controllers at IBM, deployed multicast networks at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and served as the PI on grants from NSF, Xilinx, Altera, and SAIC. He has published over 100 papers and patents related to networks and FPGA applications.

Luke Markham, Machine Learning Engineer, Graphcore.
Luke is a Machine Learning Engineer at Graphcore, a start-up building supercomputers to enable next-generation ML, where he works with financial services customers to maximise the performance of their HPC and ML models. He has worked on a variety of data-related problems with investment banks, hedge funds, dark pool providers and real-time trade analytics platforms. After studying Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, he worked as a data science consultant for 3 years at Tessella UK. Interested to discuss all forms of computationally tricky workloads, applications of ML in financial services, and how we can increase trust in statistics and ML.

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.

Brian Peterson, Managing Member, Braverock Investments, LLC.
Brian Peterson has more than two decades of automated trading experience across all asset classes globally. He is the Director of Algorithmic Trading at FalconX, principal of Braverock Investments, and teaches algo trading and machine learning on the graduate faculty of the University of Washington and the University of Illinois. At FalconX, one of the fastest growing digital asset prime brokers in the world, Brian and his team utilize advanced modeling and trading systems to facilitate billions of dollars of client trades in digital asset products. They also design bespoke structured products to enable clients seeking yield, risk management, and capital appreciation.

Jeffrey Ramsey, Managing Director and General Counsel, Geneva Trading.

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, Inc.
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.

Joe Steiner, Global CTO of Financial Services, UDS Division, Dell Technologies.
Joe joined UDS in 2010 after 20 years in the Financial Services industry (FSI). Joe held leadership positions at Bank of America, NationsBank and G.E. Capital. Since 2010 his focus has been to drive continued adoption of PowerScale, Isilon and ECS as the best scale-out file and object platforms to solve enterprise challenges facing Dell’s largest customers. Joe is working with Dell’s top global customers to help define their next generation business & technology transformations – covering automation, data protection, governance, software-defined file and object storage, converged infrastructure and empowering data driven business value!

Peter Vaisvil, Head of IT, XR Trading.
Peter has 22 years of technology experience, the last 17 from the financial industry. Over the years, Peter's core focus has been around scalable low latency network design, systems design, python development, precision global timing and general technology R&D. Currently Peter manages the global infrastructure, System engineering, technical operations and data infrastructure development for XR Trading.

Daniel Wisehart, Hardware Development, Simplex Trading.
Daniel began trading professionally in 1993 and worked on his first FPGA and ASIC designs in 1997. He has worked for 10 different trading firms in all of the electronically tradable asset classes with differing latency needs. He has designed FPGA and ASIC solutions for both trading and hardware design shops. Today he is excited to build, for ever smaller trading firms, systems that split trading applications into a mixture of hardware and software to create systems that have the latency those firms need, by design. He is currently working for an options market maker and he holds FINRA series 57 and series 24 registrations.