Panelists

CS2050 panelists include industry and academic experts with expertise in cybersecurity, computation, data science, cloud computing and storage, computational medicine and bioinformatics, and diversity in technology.

[card title=”Mark Achler” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Mark Achler is the managing director of MATH Venture Partners and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Business. Achler is also a tireless advocate in support of, and a mentor to, the Chicago entrepreneurial community. [/card]

[card title=”Gady Agam” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Gady Agam is the director of the Visual Computing Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology. He has 20 years of experience in imaging research and has conducted research in various medical imaging applications. He has strong expertise in various areas of medical imaging including enhancement, detection, segmentation, registration, and recognition. [/card]

[card title=”Peter Barris” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Peter Barris joined New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in 1992 and was named managing general partner in 1999. Since that time NEA’s assets under management have grown from $1 billion to over $13 billion and the firm has expanded its operations to India and China. Under Barris’s leadership, NEA has invested in industry-transforming technology companies like CareerBuilder, Tableau, Diapers.com, Groupon, Juniper Networks, Macromedia, Salesforce.com, TiVo, and Workday. Barris has been included on the Forbes Midas List of Top Technology Investors, the Crain’s Chicago 50 Top Tech Stars, the Washington Tech Council’s Hall of Fame, and the Washington Business Hall of Fame. [/card]

[card title=”Andrea Berry” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Andrea Berry has broken barriers in the broadcast field for over thirty years. An award winning broadcast media executive for the FOX and CBS television networks, Berry has led technical teams for high profile live sports, news, and entertainment events, and managed innovative technical operations and digital media management initiatives. Berry is a member of IIT’s Board of Trustees and the Board of Overseers for the College of Science. She is also chair of the IIT Alumni Association Board of Directors. For her outstanding work, Berry was honored with IIT’s Professional Achievement Award in 2010. [/card]

[card title=”Mustafa Bilgic” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Mustafa Bilgic is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. His main research interests are transparent and interactive machine learning, spatio-temporal reasoning, and active information gathering for decision making. He is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. [/card]

[card title=”Steven Collens” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Steven Collens is chief executive officer of MATTER, the healthcare technology startup center and community hub. MATTER opened in February 2015 and nurtures entrepreneurs and innovators building next-generation health IT, medical device, diagnostic and biopharma technologies. More than 100 healthcare startups operate at MATTER, and the company partners with 10 health systems, three universities, and more than 40 industry-leading companies. Collens is also senior advisor at Pritzker Group Venture Capital. [/card]

[card title=”Aron Culotta” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Aron Culotta is an assistant professor of computer science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he leads the Text Analysis in the Public Interest (TAPI) Lab. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science in 2008 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he developed machine learning algorithms for natural language processing. He was a Microsoft Live Labs Fellow from 2006-2008, and completed research internships at IBM, Google, and Microsoft Research. His work has received best paper awards at Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conferences. [/card]

[card title=”Boris Glavic” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Boris Glavic is an assistant professor of computer science at IIT where he leads the IIT database group. Glavic is a professed database guy, enjoying systems research based on solid theoretical foundations. His main research interests are provenance and information integration. [/card]

[card title=”Linda Goldstein” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Linda Goldstein is a software developer in San Francisco who spends a lot of time with different code languages, daedal logic, the noosphere, and sushi. She tests code, rides bicycles, reads science fiction, and plays Zendo. [/card]

[card title=”Cynthia Hood” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Cynthia Hood is the director of the Wireless Network and Communications (WiNCom) Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is the recipient of an National Science Foundation Career Award. Her research interests include spectrum management, sensor networks, adaptive systems, sociotechnical systems, and computing in public policy. [/card]

[card title=”Andrew Hoog” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Andrew Hoog is a mobile security researcher, expert witness, and chief executive officer and co-founder of NowSecure, an enterprise mobile security company. Hoog has one patent with two more pending and has authored two books on mobile forensics and security. When not breaking (or fixing) things, he enjoys great wine, running, and science fiction. [/card]

[card title=”Joe Jablonski” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Joe Jablonski is a serial entrepreneur that has founded several technology based companies. He is currently the CTO of Xeograph, a company building extremely large database systems. He has started and built businesses in a variety of industries including storage systems, insurance carriers, fundraising platforms, and predictive analytics in manufacturing. [/card]

[card title=”Kevin Jin” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Kevin Jin is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cyber-security, trustworthy cyber-physical critical infrastructures, software-defined networking, and simulation modeling and analysis. [/card]

[card title=”John Korah” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] John Korah is a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. His research interests are in the areas of parallel/distributed processing, computational social systems modeling, and information retrieval, with applications to domains such as computational epidemiology. Previously, he served as the associate director of the National Center of Border Security (NCBSI), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech. [/card]

[card title=”Emmanuel Klu” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Emmanuel Klu is a software engineer at Google, where he leads a team building a data processing and management platform. He graduated from Illinois Tech in 2013 with a B.S. in computer science and sits on the Alumni Association Board of Directors. Klu is very involved in Google’s college and diversity recruiting efforts. [/card]

[card title=”Zhiling Lan” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Zhiling Lan received her Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in 2002. She is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology and a guest research faculty at Argonne National Laboratory. Her research expertise is in the area of parallel and distributed systems. She has been serving on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems since 2014. [/card]

[card title=”Adam McElhinney” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Adam McElhinney leads a team of 30 data scientists at Uptake building cutting-edge industrial data analytics tools. Formerly, he was head of business analytics and head of marketing analytics at Enova Financial, where he helped to grow the company from a small startup to a publically traded online lending leader. He has previously worked as a management consultant as well as an analyst designing simulations for the Department of Defense. McElhinney is serving his seventh year on the Board of the American Statistical Association, Chicago Chapter, and previously served as the director of mentorship program for the HFS Chicago Scholars. McElhinney holds a master’s in statistics from University of Illinois-Chicago and has undergraduate degrees in mathematics, economics, and political science from Indiana University-Bloomington. [/card]

[card title=”David Minh” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] David Minh, assistant professor of chemistry at IIT, uses computer simulations to study biochemistry. His research group develops algorithms to predict where and how tightly small molecules bind to proteins. The methods are useful for computer-aided drug design. [/card]

[card title=”Bailey Moore” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Bailey Moore heads Wintrust Ventures, a business unit of Wintrust Financial Corporation developed to support Chicago’s innovation community. Wintrust invests in Seed and Series A equity rounds and is a preferred venture debt lender to local companies. Their portfolio is comprised of 16 companies thus far. [/card]

[card title=”Dan Murphy-Olson” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Dan Murphy-Olson is the cloud services team lead for Argonne National Laboratory. He currently leads Argonne’s deployment of cloud infrastructure for science. He has over 15 years of systems infrastructure and team leadership experience. Prior to Argonne, Murphy-Olson spent many years working with Fortune 100 clients for IBM Global Services. Leveraging this extensive experience, Murphy-Olson is working to bridge the gap between bleeding edge and production computing. [/card]

[card title=”Frank Naeymi-Rad” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Frank Naeymi-Rad is chief executive officer, chairman of the board and co-founder of Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology. His thesis work focused on the role of medical vocabulary to support database translation, information retrieval, intelligent medical records, and expert systems.
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[card title=”Sonja Petrović” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Sonja Petrović is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky (2008), and did her post-doctoral research at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She joined the IIT applied math department after working as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University and as a visiting scholar at UIC and the Mittag-Leffler Institute. Her research focuses on the interplay between fundamental questions about statistical models and their relationship to algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and computation. Using combinatorics, algebra, polyhedral geometry, statistics, and computation, Petrović investigates applied problems of relevance to the Department of Defense, social network analysis, and solving systems of polynomial equations. She actively involves and mentors students in her research. [/card]

[card title=”Jean-François Pombert” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Jean-François Pombert is a computational genomics expert specialized in high-throughput sequencing. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Université Laval (Québec, Canada) in 2008 and joined the ranks of IIT’s biology department as assistant professor in August 2013. His research focuses on the evolution of human-infecting pathogens and associated diseases. [/card]

[card title=”Jason Resch” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Jason Resch is a senior software architect at Cleversafe—a company that pioneered new algorithms for data storage. In his 10 years at the company, Resch has specialized in finding ways to improve reliability, performance, and security at the exabyte scale and in the process has been granted over 230 patents. [/card]

[card title=”Katherine Riley” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Katherine Riley is the Director of Science for the ALCF leading division activities in computational science, performance engineering, visualizations, and data sciences. She was one of the facility’s first hires in 2007. She previously served as a principal scientific applications engineer and manager of the ALCF catalyst team, a group of computational scientists who work directly with users to help them maximize their time on ALCF systems and achieve their research goals. Riley has also been a key contributor to the strategic vision of the facility, assisting with the design and development of ALCF supercomputers by helping to identify the scientific requirements for new systems. She has spent her career focused on scientific application architecture and how this impacts performance, scalability, and extensibility. Prior to joining the ALCF, she served as scientific applications engineer in the MCS division at Argonne and as a senior scientific programmer at the University of Chicago where she was a primary developer and co-architect of the FLASH multi-physics code. In her new role as Director of Science, Riley leads scientific strategy for the ALCF, ensuring the facility delivers leading-edge computational capabilities and expertise that help advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines. [/card]

[card title=”Linsey Rubenstein” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Linsey Rubenstein is the vice president of business and supply chain systems at The Boeing Company. In this role, she works as a strategic partner with Boeing’s business units and functions by managing technology systems that are critical to the company’s success. Rubenstein has more than 18 years of experience at Boeing and has held various leadership positions in strategy, operations, manufacturing, product development, engineering and supply chain for Boeing’s commercial airplanes, shared services, and technology organizations. Prior to assuming her current role, she served as the director of strategy, operations and assessments for information security, a role in which she was responsible for portfolio management and strategy; policy; governance, risk management and compliance; cyber intelligence and analysis; vulnerability assessments and remediation; and third-party security for Boeing’s worldwide suppliers and subsidiaries. Rubenstein earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. and a master’s degree in engineering systems from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was selected as a fellow in the Leaders for Global Operations Program. Rubenstein was also a research fellow at Amazon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Academy for Urban School Leadership. [/card]

[card title=”Reza Rooholamini” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Reza Rooholamini is vice president of enterprise architecture and technology at CCC Information Services. Here, he is responsible for the architecture and technologies in developing and running Software as a Service (SaaS). This includes architecture and technologies required in developing the software, DevOp, and the hardware and software infrastructure for delivery of the service. Prior to this, he was responsible for the product development of Dell’s PowerEdge SMP servers, cluster offerings, database, virtualization, messaging, and custom solutions. With more than 17 years of experience in the computer and communications industries, he has worked extensively in product development and has served as a technology consultant to many companies. Additionally, Rooholamini was professor of computer systems at the University of Wisconsin. His current research interests are scale out solutions including clustering, cloud computing, virtualization, and scalable datacenter designs. He has more than two-dozen publications in conferences and journals. Rooholamini obtained a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and an M.S. in electrical engineering and in computer science from the University of Wisconsin. He also holds a Ph.D. in computer science/engineering from the University of Minnesota. [/card]

[card title=”Ernest Sanders” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Ernest Sanders is founder and managing partner at ComeUnity Based Solutions. He has spent 30 years in the competitive marketplace, educating, managing, and/or directing aspects of grant writing and donor cultivation, digital inclusion, community and economic development, communications, supply chain management, in and after-school programming, teacher preparation, social service and healthcare implementation, property management, politics, environmental-health-and-safety, and loss and violence prevention. Sanders was recognized by Crain’s Business Magazine as one of the Top Tech 50 for 2013 and he was named as the University of Chicago 2014 Community Partner of the Year during their 74th Anniversary Celebration. [/card]

[card title=”Jeff Wereszczynski” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Jeff Wereszczynski received his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Michigan in 2008. Following this, he performed postdoctoral work at the University of California San Diego under the guidance of J. Andrew McCammon, one of the pioneers in the field of computational chemistry. He has been on the faculty of Illinois Tech as an assistant professor of physics since 2013. His research interests involve performing atomic-scale simulations of protein, DNA, and lipid molecules to probe the physical foundations for how life functions. This involves the use of large-scale computer simulations that take advantage of national supercomputer resources as well as advances in GPU technology. [/card]

[card title=”Dennis Wisnosky” text=”text-darken-3 grey” title_color=”blue”] Dennis Wisnosky has degrees from California University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Dayton. He is a certified enterprise architect, a certified manufacturing engineer (robotics), a PADI certified rescue diver, and an instrument rated private pilot in multiengine aircraft. He and his wife live in Naperville, Illinois. They have three daughters and nine grandchildren. [/card]