Chairs/Advisors
With over 22 years of invaluable experience at Intel, Willie Nelson has played a pivotal role in driving the early adoption of diverse storage technologies. As a Technology Enabling Architect, he has dedicated his career to facilitating seamless transitions to cutting-edge interfaces and use cases, encompassing PCIe, CXL, NVMe, SSDs, NVDIMMs, Optane, and various other Persistent Memory devices.
In recent years, Willie has been a key asset to Jim Pappas' Ecosystem Enabling team, actively collaborating with vendors to spearhead early enablement and adoption of crucial new IO technologies. His expertise extends beyond the confines of Intel, as he actively manages and directs multiple successful industry associations and cross-industry initiatives. Willie currently serves as the Treasurer for the SNIA Compute Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI), and also holds the position of Co-Chair of the CMSI Marketing Working Group.
Willie Nelson's commitment to technological advancement and his leadership in industry associations underscore his reputation as a forward-thinking and influential figure in the ever-evolving landscape of storage technology.
Chuck Sobey is Conference Chair of Flash Memory Summit (FMS). Under his leadership, FMS has increased its size, scope, and influence worldwide, while navigating the unprecedented effects the pandemic has had on the global events industry. Chuck is a respected memory and storage technology strategist, researcher, and lecturer. As Chief Scientist of ChannelScience, he guides clients in evaluating emerging memory and storage technologies and in maximizing their reliability and performance. He uses probability analysis to match a technology's projected capabilities to an application's requirements. His team has won SBIR awards from the US Department of Energy to advance the field of magnetic tape recording, on which practically all of the hyperscale and cloud services rely.
Chuck's clarity of explanation and extensive experience and industry network make him a sought-after technical and business development consultant. He has taught storage/memory technology seminars around the world. Chuck is also General Chair of SmartNICs Summit, which he is co-developing to support the hyperscale and cloud data center ecosystem. He earned an MS ECE from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a BS ECE from Carnegie Mellon University. He holds 7 US patents.
Brian's duties as Technical Chair for Flash Memory Summit include chairing the Architectures track, which has addressed topics including the evolution of the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) since he originated this track in 2009. He also organizes the Software and Artificial Intelligence tracks and the Invited Talks, is a member of the Lifetime Achievement Awards (LAA) committee, and has played an active role in many other aspects of the conference since 2007.
Through his Berg Software Design consultancy, Brian provides hardware and software design and development services for storage and interface technologies in consumer electronics, including flash memory, NVMe and USB, and he works extensively with intellectual property and patents. He has participated in over 80 conferences as a speaker, session chair and conference chair. Brian is also active as an IEEE officer and volunteer, and has received IEEE awards for Outstanding Leadership and service. He has initiated and organized the dedications of over a dozen IEEE Milestones, including one for the Floating Gate EEPROM and its importance for the success of flash memory. He holds a Bachelors in Mathematics, and was in the Computer Engineering graduate program at Stanford University before forming a startup company with some associates.
Jay Kramer, founder at Network Storage Advisors, is a dynamic results-oriented strategic marketing leader and creator of world-class marketing teams with a proven track record of building company brand and demand generation initiatives that accelerate sales.
He has over 25 years of repeated marketing success with industry leading Fortune 500 companies (Unisys, Seagate) as well as early and late stage emerging companies. His industry knowledge spans cloud, virtualization, software defined storage (SDS), hyper convergence, data protection, SAN, NAS, and object storage solutions plus network storage technologies including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, VTL, dedup, backup, and replication.
He has served as board member to technology industry associations and event development/professional conference companies.
Jim Handy, a widely recognized semiconductor analyst, comes to Objective Analysis with over 30 years in the electronics industry including 14 years as an industry analyst for Dataquest (now Gartner) and Semico Research.
His background includes marketing and design positions at market-leading suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon.
A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of articles for trade journals, Dataquest, Semico, and other prior employers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.
Mr. Handy has a strong technical leaning, with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and is a patent holder in the field of cache memory design. He is the author of "The Cache Memory Book" (Harcourt Brace, 1993), the leading reference in the field. Handy also holds an MBA degree from the University of Phoenix. He has performed rigorous technical analysis on the economics of memory manufacturing and sales, discrediting some widely held theories while unveiling other true motivators of market behavior.
Mr. Handy is on the Advisory Board of the Flash Memory Summit , a member of the Mass Storage Technical Working Group of the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative, and is a Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors.
FMS China Liaison
Jianjun ("Jerome") Luo, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Sage Microelectronics, a fabless integrated circuit (IC) design house providing bridge and SSD controller ICs, as well as customized storage products.
In addition, Jianjun Luo is the director of the Microelectronics Research Institute of Hangzhou Dianzi University, China, where he is also a professor active in IC design.
Jerome began his career in Hangzhou Eastern Communication Corp, designing SDH/SONET ASICs and GSM baseband chips. After moving to San Jose, California in 2001, he cofounded Baleen Systems Inc., where he designed SD/MMC controller ICs for storage applications. Then he became the director of R&D for Initio Corp., a leading IDE/SATA/USB controller supplier.
Prof. Luo holds a B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and an M.S degree in Microelectronic CAE Center in Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Zhengjiang University, China.
Camberley serves as the VP and Practice Lead at The Futurum Group bringing over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at VERITAS, GE Access, and EDS. Her unique 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm. She joined The Futurum Group through their acquisition of Evaluator Group in 2023.
As the Managing Director at Evaluator Group from 2009 until 2023 she built a highly respected team, known for its deep technical expertise delivering competitive and market knowledge backed by data based economic and hands-on experience with the technology and IT consulting services. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a BS degree in International Business from California State University - Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Exhibitors and Sponsors, VP Sales
As Vice President of Sales for the past 15 years, Kat has had a wealth of experience in sales for a variety of conferences hosted by Conference ConCepts in multiple markets. The past 7 years, she has specifically focused on Flash Memory Summit Sales new growth and customer-retention. In 2020 transcending the huddle of virtual events. Using her skills in business and marketing, Kat has been able to manage many different aspects of Flash Memory Summit as well as sales.
With over 20 years of expertise across a broad range of Marketing disciplines, including lead generation, market research, trade show management, marketing communications, social media marketing, and graphic design. Her career spans a gamut of business entities from corporate organizations and national laboratories, to government agencies. Kat has a proven track record in creating strong external professional alliances among many different market segments in the commercial, communications, and government industries. Prior to Conference ConCepts, she was Marketing Event Manager at SBS Technologies/GE Intelligent Platforms, where she focused primarily on global trade show management.
Kat holds a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) and a Bachelor's Degree in Business Management/ Marketing and Communications, from University of Phoenix.
Communications Director & Conference Videographer
W. David Schwaderer is CEO of ShapeShift Ciphers LLC and a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur. He has presented Erasure Coding seminars at Usenix™ FAST conferences and at leading Silicon Valley conferences and enterprises. David lectures Silicon Valley companies on innovation and its manifold surprises. His October 2007 MIT joint Sloan School of Management and EE Department conference lecture was selected best in conference. He has 12 issued and pending patents, and has authored six commercial software programs and eleven technical books. David has a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Cal Tech and an MBA from the University of Southern California.
Members
Product Marketing professional with an MBA and 15+ years of marketing, product development, and strategic planning experience. Strong ability to establish relationships of trust with cross functional teams to develop and lead product strategy and go-to-market initiatives for hardware and software product portfolios. Worldwide experience in both domestic and international markets (Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific) along with a broad range of vertical markets segments including Enterprise IT, Healthcare, Government, and Finance. Proven talent to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.
Wayne Adams has a longstanding career of IT industry experience spanning business development, technical product/solution management, and partner ecosystems. He has been an Advisor and Industry Consultant, including many engagements in SNIA leadership roles since 2002. Wayne has served on the SNIA Board since 2003, including as Chair, Chair Emeritus, and Treasurer, as well as in various chair and leadership roles at forums, initiatives, conferences, and strategic alliances. He has been employed by EMC, DEC, and Eastman Kodak, and has been in business technology development delegations to China and the PacRim. Wayne has also been involved in standards groups including DMTF, W3C, Cloud Security Alliance, INCITS, OASIS, and IoT/OMG. He earned his BS degree with a dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Univ. of Pittsburgh.
Mr. Amidi currently serve as Global Vice President of Technology and General Manager Americas of Intelligent Memory, a subsidiary of Neumonda GmbH, a Walden International backed company. Mike has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor and technology industries where he spent the last 25 years in the Solid State Storage space. He held various upper management and executive positions in companies such as sTEC (A Western Digital Company), SMART Modular Technologies, Netlist, Western Digital (WD), and Xitore. As part of his executive level responsibilities, he managed business units with over $250M P&L and successfully led diversified teams across geographically dispersed areas in the U.S., China, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brazil.
Among his accomplishments, Mr. Amidi has served as Advisory Board Member of Flash Memory Summit since 2017 and holds 28 fully granted and issued patents through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He also authored several technical publications in the DRAM and Storage space.
Dmytro Apalkov is Director of Magnetic Cell Modeling and Design with the Spintronic Device Team at Samsung Semiconductor. His primary interest is in the design, modeling, and analysis of spin-transfer or spin-orbit torque switched MRAM. A leading researcher, he has written over 50 published papers and holds 75 patents. Before joining Samsung, he worked on magnetic recording technology at Maxtor. He earned a PhD in physics from the University of Alabama.
JB Baker has a track record of success with new products for enterprise and data center storage. He joined ScaleFlux in 2018 to lead Product Planning & Marketing with an expansion of the capabilities of Computational Storage, and its adoption in the marketplace. He entered the data storage field with Intel in 2000 to manage the i960 and xScale I/O Processors. He transitioned to LSI in 2008, where he led the definition and launch of the LSI Nytro PCIe Flash products, and was instrumental in ramping the new product line with Tier 1 OEMs, Hyperscalers and Financial Industry customers. With Seagate's acquisition of the LSI Flash assets in 2014, JB's role expanded to cover the entire SSD product portfolio, achieving record levels of SSD revenue for the company. He earned his BA from Harvard, and has an MBA from Cornell's Johnson School.
Stephen Bates is CTO at Eideticom, a developer of leading edge storage, compute, and applications for programmable platforms in the cloud or at the network edge. He focuses on applying emerging technologies such as NVMe, RDMA, new non-volatile memories, and advanced programmable logic to create complex storage and communications systems. He has combined several such technologies to implement computational storage that offers performance well above today's production systems. He is also an active contributor to the Linux kernel. Before joining Eideticom, he worked in the CTO office at PMC-Sierra and was a professor of computer engineering at the University of Alberta. He holds a PhD in signal processing from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has given presentations at Storage Developer Conference and at past Flash Memory Summits.
Matias Bjørling is a Distinguished Engineer/Senior Director at Western Digital, leading its Emerging System Architectures group. His research interests include emerging memory and storage technologies, scaling of computation and storage, and special-purpose accelerators. In addition, he has a passion for driving significant ecosystem changes by bringing people together to solve fundamental challenges in data centers. He co-chairs the NVM Express (NVMe) Zoned Namespace (ZNS) Command Set specification, and leads Western Digital's efforts on its ecosystem enablement. Bjørling earned a Ph.D. degree in database and systems from IT University of Copenhagen, and has published at several high-impact system and storage conferences.
Paul is a leading industry expert on the foundations of resilient network and storage infrastructures. Previously, he served as CEO of Earth Computing; on Apple's Infrastructure team; CEO of Replicus Research; VP/CTO of VERITAS Software; VP/Chief Architect for Storage Systems at Quantum Corp.; and Distinguished Engineer, Dir. of Architecture & Performance, and a Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems.
Paul was co-founder of the IEEE Hot Interconnects Symposium, and Founding Chairman of SNIA. He previously served as VP of Technical Activities and VP of Standards, both on the Governing Board of the IEEE Computer Society. Paul has a BSc. In Physics from the University of Manchester, a Ph.D. in Physics from University College London, and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program.
Paul's lifelong obsession with dependable computing came from working with NASA, designing computer systems & software for an experiment which performed extraordinarily well on flight 51F of the Space Shuttle.
Jean S. Bozman is President of Cloud Architects Advisors LLC, a market research and consulting firm focused on enterprise and hybrid multi-cloud computing. She analyzes the worldwide markets for servers, storage, and software related to data centers and cloud infrastructure. A highly respected IT professional, she often writes for business publications, including eWeek and IDG publications. She was a Research VP at IDC, where she managed research about the worldwide markets for servers and server operating systems. Starting in 2015, Ms. Bozman was Senior Product Marketing Manager at SanDisk, and then VP/Principal Analyst at Hurwitz and Associates. She is a frequent conference participant as a speaker, chairperson, and organizer at such events as Flash Memory Summit, OpenStack, and Container World. She earned a bachelor's degree at SUNY/Stony Brook; a master's degree from Stanford; and she graduated from the Stanford GSB's LEAD business certificate program in 2021 as a Distinguished Scholar.
Cameron Brett is the Director of Enterprise SSD Marketing at KIOXIA, where he manages a team of product line managers to drive product strategy and revenue growth. Cameron have over 18 years of product marketing and management experience in storage technology and has previously held managerial positions at QLogic, PMC-Sierra, Broadcom and Adaptec. Throughout his career in high-tech product marketing, he has focused on storage for enterprise and small/medium business servers and worked to bring new generations of storage technology to market. His area of expertise includes Flash/SSD storage, virtualization, convergence and cloud technologies.
Allan Cantle is CEO of Nallasway, consulting on Heterogeneous, High Performance Computing Solutions. He is currently contracting with the OpenCAPI Consortium as the Technical Director and Board Advisor. He also volunteers as the Technical Lead for the OCP HPC SubProject. Previously, Allan was the founder of Nallatech, which, during his 25 year tenure, became widely known as a pioneer in FPGA Accelerated Computing. Before founding Nallatech; Allan was an Electronics Systems Engineer at BAE systems, developing real-time heterogeneous high-performance computers. He holds a BEng degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Plymouth and an MSc in Corporate.
Craig Carlson is a Senior Technologist at Marvell, and he has over 20 years of experience in storage networking. He is a member of the NVMe Board of Directors, and is currently Vice Chair of ANSI INCITS T11 (which defines Fibre Channel), Chair of ANSI INCITS Task Group T11.3 (the committee that defines Fibre Channel protocols), Technical Editor for the T11 Standards FC-LS-5, and FC-FS-6, and Chair of T11 Standards FC-NVMe-3 and FC-SW-8. Craig was also involved with the IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging Task Group, and is the editor of the IEEE Draft Standard 802.1Qaz (Enhanced Transmission Selection).
Joseph Chen is CEO of ULINK Technology, where he leads TCG Test Suite development and certification. He helped define the TCG Opal specifications, and has also developed and tested TCG Opal hardware and firmware. Under his leadership, ULINK has developed the Opal Family Certification Test Suites, and has been certified by the TCG SWG as a Compliance Test Lab. Joseph has also directed development of other TCG Storage testing suites such as the TCG Opal Test Cases 1.0 Test Suite, Enterprise Test Suite, and Opal Application Note Test Suite.
Joseph has been a Director of Engineering at Samsung for SSDs and HDDs, Director of Engineering at Cirrus Logic, and an engineer at Oak Technology. He has worked on HDDs and SSDs supporting NVMe, SATA, and SAS.
Tejas Chopra is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix where he leads the efforts to build foundational storage to support Netflix Studios in the Cloud. As a TedX speaker, he talks about blockchain, cloud architectures, and leadership. Tejas is an advisor to blockchain startups such as Nillion and Dorado, and an Adjunct Professor for Blockchain Technology at UAT, Arizona. His Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering is from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and he has a decade of experience working at companies such as Apple, Samsung, Box, and Cadence.
Ken Clipperton is a Managing Analyst at DCIG, a group of analysts with IT industry expertise who provide informed, insightful, third party analysis and commentary on IT hardware, software and services. Within the data center, DCIG has a special focus on the enterprise data storage and electronically stored information (ESI) industries.
Ken joined DCIG in August 2012, bringing more than 20 years of information technology experience to the team. Prior roles include server administrator, systems analyst, and then IT director at a series of three private universities. Ken has served on multiple corporate advisory boards, state-wide technology commissions and national user group boards; and presented at many national and regional technology conferences.
Throughout his career, Ken has specialized in evaluating and implementing innovative technologies to address operational, tactical and strategic business priorities. For example, Ken was a key leader in the creation of the world's first comprehensive wireless community at Buena Vista University, a project called eBVyou that became a national model and drew visiting teams from hundreds of colleges, universities and K-12 school districts.
Christopher Cox oversees new technology initiatives as well as strategic planning and standards at Montage. He is an industry veteran with 30 years at companies including Intel, 3Dfx, and AMD, where he worked in areas including memory architecture and Audio BIOS design. Cox serves on the Board of Directors of JEDEC where he is the JEDEC JC42 "All Memories" Committee Chair, is the CXL Consortium DRAM Subgroup Chair, and is a significant innovator who holds over 200 patents across different countries. He is also a US Air Force vet where he spent almost 10 years in active and reservist duty, and he also serves on the Advisory Board of RangerRoad.org, a non-profit veteran's charity.
Rob Davis is the Vice President of Storage Technology at the NVIDIA Networking Platform Group where he focuses on ways to apply high-speed interface technology to storage systems. He came to NVIDIA through the Mellanox acquisition. As technology leader and visionary for more than 35 years, he has been a key evaluator and decision maker for the development of storage networking products. He is currently leading the development and marketing of products based on NVMe over fabrics, which will allow for the high-speed networking of PCIe-based storage. Davis was previously Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic, where for 15 years he drove development and marketing of Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand technology into new markets such as blade servers. Prior to QLogic, Davis spent 20 years at Ancor Communications, which QLogic acquired in 2000. At Ancor, Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Development, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. He drove development and marketing of their Fibre Channel products in the early 90s and their InfiniBand products in the late 90s. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE, SAS, PCI, PM, SATA, and Flash Storage.
Jithendra Devegowda is a Senior Engineer at KIOXIA America, where he works on data center SSDs. He has over 10 years of experience in the storage industry and has worked on SSDs, USB and SD cards, and firmware design and development for SATA and NVMe products. His current focus is on emerging storage technologies and products. He earned a BS in computer science from VTU India.
David Duffin has been serving as the General Manager at Yangtze Memory Technologies Inc. (YMTI) since 2019, covering the US market. He formerly held the position of Vice President of Product, Test and Assembly Engineering at YMTC from 2016 to 2019. Duffin's career has included positions at Hughes Aircraft Company, Advanced Micro Devices, Spansion and SanDisk where he was Vice President of Product and Test Engineering for the entire SanDisk product portfolio.
Duffin has worked in the UK, the US, and has managed teams in China, India, Israel, Japan, Malaysia and Thailand, and he is now based in the US. Duffin has worked on many generations of memory technologies from 1980's generation EEPROM through to 3D NAND. During this time, he has delivered products across the full spectrum of market segments including retail, mobile, embedded, client, enterprise, and automotive. Duffin received his Bachelor of Engineering with Honors in Electronic Engineering from Abertay University in Dundee, UK.
Dave Eggleston is the owner and Principal of Intuitive Cognition Consulting, and he provides strategy and business development services to leading NVM and Storage clients. Dave's extensive background in Flash, MRAM, RRAM, and Storage is built on 30+ years of industry experience serving as VP of Embedded Memory at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, CEO of RRAM pioneer start-up Unity Semiconductor (acquired by Rambus), Director of Flash Systems Engineering at Micron, NVM Product Engineering manager at SanDisk, and NVM Engineer at AMD. Dave is frequently invited as a speaker at international conferences as an expert on emerging NVM technologies and their applications. He holds a BSEE degree from Duke University, a MSEE degree from Santa Clara University, and 25+ NVM related granted patents.
Mohamad El-Batal is part of the Seagate Office of the CTO, wherein he helps shape the Cloud Systems Group strategy and influence the future technologies of Systems, SSDs and HDD products. He is currently on the NVMe Board of Directors. He co-chairs the OCP NVMe HDD working group, and the OCP PCIe (NVMe & CXL) Extended Connectivity Workstream. He is paving the way to enable a common connectivity methodology for Electrical and Optical PCIe with NVMe and/or CXL protocol. Mohamad authored the initial Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) draft specification, and was on its Board of Directors for multiple years. He has also participated in industry groups including the FC, SAS, GenZ, NVMe and CXL consortiums.
Mohamad has worked at leading storage technology and cloud providers, including Tandem, EMC, Mylex, IBM, LSI, Engenio, NetApp, Avago and Seagate. He has over 30 years of enterprise hardware and software storage architecture experience and innovation, and he holds 30+ issued and 20+ pending patents covering: Silicon, HA, FW, SSD and Systems design. Mohamad has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and did Graduate work on Digital Signal Processing at the Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
Robin researches storage technology hardware designs and standards, and provides technical guidance in the development of the proprietary hardware and software tools and processes that Ontrack uses to recover clients' data when unexpected data loss happens. He holds the firm belief that storage technology designs can and should incorporate data recovery "friendly" features, and that this can be achieved without compromising performance and data security. Robin has a Higher National Diploma (BTEC, UK) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and has been hands-on in data recovery engineering since 1995.
Richard Fetik, CISSP, is CEO and founder of Data Confidential, a security consultancy focusing on data confidentiality, system reliability, and reductions in operating costs. He is an expert at designing security into the real world, including embedded systems and devices as well as traditional IT systems. Rich has broad product experience from design and development through market introduction and evangelism. He is also the inventor of a new security model that includes the patented storage firewall and other technologies; this approach provides protection for device integrity (anti-tamper), information assurance, and data confidentiality, while enhancing operational adaptability and preserving functionality while under cyber-attack.
After decades of writing, editing and arguing over many high technology protocol standards, Tom has become a teacher of those same protocols. Those same principles of breaking down complex processes into simple, easy to understand steps are now being used to teach a whole new generation of firmware and hardware engineers about the latest in computer protocols.
John Geldman leads the SSD Industry Standards team at KIOXIA. He has worked in NAND & Spinning Storage, Linux & VxWorks internals, Networking, Security, & IC development. John serves as an NVMe Board of Directors member. He is currently active in NVMe, T13, T10, PCI-SIG, JEDEC, and SATA-IO. John has also actively participated in IEEE 1667, IEEE 1619, TCG, USB, CF, SD, & UFSA committees. John began working in storage in '84 with a dream of enabling $50 shrink wrapped 20 MB spinning drives through controller design (one dream accomplished).
John holds an MSCS from Santa Clara University, a BSECE from Clarkson University, and has been awarded multiple patents.
Javier González is a Principal Software Engineer at Samsung Memory Solutions, where he leads Samsung's first European R&D center. He works on Open-Channel SSDs and their support in Linux. He is a founding member of the Open-Channel SSD community and has worked on all the specifications as well as on the Linux ecosystem. He is the main architect and developer of pblk, the Linux Kernel FTL used by LightNVM. He earned a PhD in computer science at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of several articles on SSDs and has presented at many events, including Flash Memory Summit.
Abel Gordon is the Chief System Architect of Lightbits Labs, where he architected a low latency clustered block storage solution based on NVMe/TCP protocol. Abel has more than 20 years of experience researching, designing and building systems, and has published more than 40 papers and patents. Prior to joining Lightbits labs, Abel led the Kernel and Networking team of Stratoscale's hyper-converged private cloud solution. Abel also worked at IBM Research -- Haifa, where he led multiple activities in the area of machine and I/O virtualization. He contributed new features to the KVM hypervisor and co-authored award-winning papers. Abel also designed and implemented modern software systems to control unmanned aerial vehicles while he worked at Elbit Systems. Abel holds a B.Sc. (Cum Laude) in Information Systems Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Kiran Gunnam is a key inventor in the areas of advanced error correction systems, storage-class memory systems, and computer vision-based localization & navigation systems. He has nearly 100 patents on algorithms, architectures, and real-time low-cost implementations for computing, storage, computer vision, and AI systems, and he is the lead or sole inventor of about 90% of these. Dr. Gunnam is also a key contributor to the precise localization and navigation technology commercialized for autonomous aerial refueling and space docking applications. His recent patent-pending inventions on low-complexity simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for object detection, tracking, and classification are commercialized for LiDAR+ camera-based perception for autonomous driving and robotic systems. Kiran's more recent inventions on machine learning accelerators have ~2x savings vs the previous state of the art, and his inventions are currently incorporated into over 3 billion data storage, Wi-Fi and 5G chips.
Dr. Gunnam is the Chair of IEEE CASS Standards Activities Subdivision and is on the Board of Governors for IEEE CASS. He is an IEEE Distinguished Speaker, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, and a recipient of the ValleyML Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for long-lasting contributions to architectures and algorithms of real-time signal processing, communication, and machine learning systems that enabled ubiquitous computing.
Purush Gupta is Sr. Director of Software for Storage platforms at Oracle. He has worked in storage and systems groups at pioneers like Nutanix and SanDisk in product strategy, hardware and firmware development. Product experience includes tape media/drives, magnetic disks, SSDs, storage arrays, clusters, and hyper-converged and hyper-scale configurations. Protocol experience includes SCSI-2, ATAPI, SATA, SAS, and NVMe. Purush contributed to the NVMe specification during its early days, especially the online firmware upgrade, logging, and features components. He demonstrated one of the earliest fully functional NVMe/SOP-PQI prototype drives at FMS and SNIA in 2012. Purush holds five patents, and his MS is from SDSM&T, Rapid City, SD. He is passionate about the data storage industry, and looks to contribute to the core technology, applications (Disaster recovery, Cryptography Distributed storage, Data protection and File systems), and physical/logical protocols.
At Meta, Rohit Gupta is responsible for the high density flash storage platform supporting database performance accelerations and ingesting artificial intelligence clusters. He is an industry thought leader who has written several blogs, has participated in many industry conferences, and has peer reviewed many research articles in IEEE and other industry leading journals. Prior to Meta, Rohit was responsible for enterprise segment management at Western Digital and SanDisk where he worked on product and technology strategies, next-generation cloud compute and storage architecture, customer engagements and roadmap alignments, long-term business negotiations and agreements, and long-range market and financial modeling. He was also a product manager at HGST for the industry's first 4.8TB HHHL PCIe Add-In Card for application performance acceleration and big data analytics. Rohit also worked at Freescale Semiconductor on compute intensive SOCs for communication networks.
Jonmichael Hands is currently serving as the VP of Storage Business Development at Chia. He partners with the storage vendors for Chia optimized product development, market modeling, and Chia blockchain integration. JM spent the last ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. In addition, he served as the chair for NVM Express (NVMe), SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) SSD special interest group, and Open Compute Project for open storage hardware innovation. JM started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.
Erich Haratsch is Senior Director Architecture at Marvell, where he leads the architecture definition for Bravera™ SSD controllers and other memory-based products. Prior to joining Marvell, he worked at Seagate and LSI, where he worked on Nytro® and SandForce® branded SSD controllers. Earlier in his career, he developed signal processing and error correction technologies for multiple generations of HDD controllers at LSI and Agere Systems. He started his career at AT&T and Lucent Bell Labs, where he worked on Gigabit Ethernet over copper, optical communications and the MPEG-4 video standard. He is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and holds more than 200 U.S. patents. He also is a Senior Member of IEEE, and earned his MS and PhD degrees from the Technical University of Munich (Germany).
Troy Hegr is a Sr. Manager at Ontrack, the world leader in data recovery, data erasure, and data protection. Mr. Hegr helps facilitate discussion and fosters partnerships in the technical community with leading data storage and computer system designers, SSD manufacturers and industry groups. Mr. Hegr benefits from over 25 years of experience in the data recovery and digital forensics industries and has been a Flash Memory Summit CAB member, session organizer, and presenter for several years. Mr. Hegr is based in the Tampa Bay, Fl. area and has an Electronics Technician degree from DeVry Institute of Technology and holds a certification in project management from the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management.
Justin Heindel leads business development and products for the cloud and hyperscale segment at Pure Storage. He has over 20 years of marketing, business development and engineering leadership experience in storage, semiconductors, and medical technology.
Justin was previously VP of Marketing & BD at CNEX Labs, a leading provider of enterprise and data center SSD controllers, SSD solutions, and storage accelerators. He was also an executive at Marvell, and a member of a core team that drove the company from pre-IPO to the Fortune 500, and was involved in its HDD, SSD, RAID controller, storage connectivity, and optical storage businesses. Justin has been a committee member for numerous storage standards initiatives, and has held chair positions for the Denali and CE-ATA work groups. He has a BS from Cornell University, and has been granted one US patent.
While Sr. VP of Business Development for Data Storage at Twist Bioscience, Steffen brought over 25 years of industry experience in product, technology, and business development roles in semiconductor memory and data storage. He was responsible for product roadmap leadership, and establishing strategic relationships with ecosystem stakeholders.
Prior to Twist, Steffen was VP, Corporate Strategy and Business Development for Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital, and he has held executive management positions at Everspin, SandForce, Seagate Technology, Lexar Media, Samsung Semiconductor, Fujitsu and SMART Modular. Mr. Hellmold has been deeply engaged in various industry trade associations and standards organizations including co-founding the DNA Data Storage Alliance as well as USB Flash Drive Alliance. He holds an Economic Electrical Engineering degree (EEE) from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
Andy Higginbotham leads Phison's US sales and marketing efforts for Enterprise SSDs and Controllers, Redrivers, Retimers and PMICs. He also serves as Phison's US representative for industry analyst and investor relations.
He has been in the storage industry for over 30 years, starting with tape drives at SONY Electronics, disk drives at Western Digital and Samsung, and SSDs at SanDisk. Andy holds an MBA from Santa Clara Univ., and a BS in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara.
In Micron's Storage Business Unit, Jonathan investigates new technology and products, both internally as well as with customers and partners. He was previously Executive Director and Distinguished Researcher of System Architecture at Lenovo, where he led their research of datacenter computing architecture. Jonathan is an industry leading technical expert in memory, storage devices, and data center systems architecture with over 24 years of experience. In the JEDEC standards organization, Jonathan serves on the Board of Directors as Vice-Chair of Marketing and Chairs the CXL Memory Task Group, standardizing CXL-attached memory devices. He also invented and drove the first development of the EDSFF 1U Short (E1.S) NVMe drive, the VLP DIMM, and NVDIMM Persistent Memory. He has generated more than 34 granted or pending patents, and earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Andy Hsu is the Founder and CEO of NEO Semiconductor, a startup company located in San Jose, California. The company was founded in 2012 and focused on the development of NAND flash memory and emerging memory technologies. In 2020, the company debuted a new technology called 'X-NAND' in Flash Memory Summit and won the "Most Innovative Flash Memory Startup" award.
He has over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He is an inventor of more than 120 U.S. patents. Before founding NEO Semiconductor, he served as VP of Engineering in a startup company for 16 years, and led the R&D and Engineering teams to develop more than 60 memory products in NOR flash memory, EEPROM, and NVSRAM. In graduate school, he did research in the field of Neural Network and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He earned a Master degree in Electrical, Computer, and System Engineering (ECSE) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York, and a Bachelor degree from the National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.
Dr. Xinde Hu is currently a system architect at Cohesity. His responsibilities include performance engineering for Cohesity's data management software systems. Before joining Cohesity, Dr. Hu held the Director of engineering position at WD/SanDisk and STMicroelectronics. Dr. Hu has authored more than a dozen technical papers on data storage systems and has 38 patents issued. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Syed S. Hussain is responsible for the Automotive and Emerging market segments at GigaDevice Semiconductor. He uses his market awareness in product/company positioning and developing Tier1 major OEM and ODM design wins. Syed has over 30 years of experience in technology marketing, including positions with Infineon Technologies, Winbond Electronics, NEC Electronics, Integrated Device Technology, and National Semiconductor. He has published several magazine articles and has presented at FMS and many other technical events. His BSEE is from the Univ. of Miami.
Jeff Janukowicz is a Research VP at IDC where he provides insight and analysis on the SSD and HDD components markets. In this role, Jeff provides expert opinion, in-depth market research, and strategic analysis on the dynamics, trends, and opportunities facing the industry. His research includes market forecasts, market share reports, and technology trends for clients, investors, suppliers, and manufacturers.
Mr. Janukowicz brings more than 15 years of experience within the technology industry to IDC, including more than 10 years in storage and 13 years in the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining IDC, Jeff was in strategic marketing for Agere Systems where he was responsible for market research, business planning, and marketing activities. In addition, he has held various marketing and engineering positions during his career.
Pedram Khalili works on developing the computing systems of the future, starting from novel nano-scale devices/materials that enable systems with unprecedented performance and energy efficiency. Much of his work involves devices that use both the spin and charge of electrons, also referred to as spintronics. Previously Pedram was an adjunct assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA from 2013-2017, where he co-led the memory program within the NSF TANMS center, focusing on development of electric-field-controlled magnetic memory with unprecedented energy efficiency. During 2009-2014, at UCLA he was project manager of two DARPA multi-institution programs, focusing on the development of spin-transfer-torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) and non-volatile logic (NVL), working with several major industry and university partners. These programs resulted in the world's fastest and lowest-power magnetic memory technologies at the time. In addition, since 2012 he has been co-founder of Inston Inc., a startup company pioneering voltage-controlled MRAM for high-performance computing applications, where he also served as board member and chief technology officer for five years. His professional activities have included serving as a guest editor for Spin, and serving on the technical program committee of the Joint MMM/Intermag Conference.
John F. Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at NVIDIA, where he helps storage customers and vendors benefit from high performance interconnects and smart offloads, including RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). He is a frequent conference participant, including several past Flash Memory Summits, and a frequent blogger on storage and networking topics. He is also chair of the Ethernet Storage Forum. Before joining NVIDIA, he created storage solutions and alliances at NetApp and EMC. He has a BA from Harvard University.
Axel Kloth's company Abacus Semi is a fabless processor company focused on closing the order-of-magnitude performance gap between benchmark and real-life performance in supercomputers for most applications. Its products will be partially predicated on memory that incorporates both volatile and non-volatile memory. Earlier companies founded by Axel include Axiado, SSRLabs (focused on high-performance computing) and Parimics (focused on real-time vision and image/video analysis). He holds over 40 patents and patent applications in the areas of computer, processor and security architecture; parallelization; switch fabrics; contention resolution; and PHY layer networking.
Axel has published books and articles on processors, I/O, networking and HPC. His work revolves around processors, processor interconnects, switch fabrics and high speed serial links, which make up the bulk of HPC. Axel introduced CML-type HSSLs on standard CMOS in 2000, and he serves as a Venture Partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures.
Marilyn Kushnick is a Research and Development Engineer at Advantest, where she is currently an RTL designer for FPGAs in testers. She specializes in low power mode testing of SSD drives. She has experience in both the hardware and software sides of test equipment, having worked on embedded Linux drivers, tester controller software and GUI, and test programs. She holds a BS in electrical and computer engineering from UCLA.
Dave Landsman is Director of Industry Standards at Western Digital, where he manages storage standards efforts for data center, client, and mobile/removable markets. A recognized leader in storage standards, Dave has been involved in many important groups, including NVMe, PCI-SIG, JEDEC, SATA-IO, T10, T13, SNA, SFF, and USB-IF. He is currently WD's board representative for NVMe, SATA-IO, and the CompactFlash Association, and is co-chair of the Storage Work Group at the Trusted Computing Group. He has contributed to many standards work groups and has presented on standards at many conferences including Flash Memory Summit. He has worked on storage for 12 years and has over 30 years experience in the semiconductor industry. He earned a BA in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.
Chris Lyon, a 12 year storage veteran is currently the executive director of the FCIA and has held that position for over eight years. Prior to FCIA, Chris has held various marketing positions at Vixel, McDATA, Connex and SAN Navigator.
In 2005, Chris achieved the title of Certified Association Executive (CAE) – the highest professional recognition available from the American Society of Association Executives. A CAE must meet a rigorous set of requirements to be eligible to take the examination covering Governance & Structure; Leadership Processes; Management & Administration; Internal & External Relations; and Programs & Services.
Andy is Owner and President of Marken Communications, a marketing and communications Consultant, since August 1977. The 30-year agency has been involved with a broad range of corporate and marketing activities with major emphasis on the M&E industry. He is the author of more than 700 articles on management, marketing and communications and a frequent speaker at content production/distribution, management and marketing conferences. Experience includes strategic, market planning and execution with communications/Internet firms including AT&T and CERFnet as well as in storage, storage management and video solutions. He has an extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media and industry analysts/consultants.
Howard Marks has participated in and followed the storage industry since founding disk subsystem OEM ProComp Systems in 1981. He has presented regularly at industry events, from Comdex to Flash Memory Summit. He's reported on and provided analysis for major industry publications including PC Magazine, Network Computing, Storage Pipeline, and Information Week, and through his own analyst firm DeepStorage.
Bill Martin has been a leading figure in developing storage standards for many years, providing innovative contributions to NVMe, SCSI, Serial ATA, and Fibre Channel. He is currently in charge of SSD I/O standards at Samsung, where he represents the company in the NVMe, SCSI, SNIA, and ATA standards efforts as well as working with customers to overcome performance hurdles. He has driven Samsung's initiatives for SSD storage intelligence and other performance enhancements. He has served as chairman, vice-chairman, editor, or secretary for many standards groups and has led the development of new protocols for NVMe, SCSI, SNIA, and SATA to improve SSD performance in storage subsystems and data center applications. He also was instrumental in adding 32 GFC and 128 GFC to the Fibre Channel framing and signaling standard. He has previous standards experience with Emulex, Sierra Logic, Brocade, Gadzoox, and HP. He earned a BSEE from University of California, Davis.
Thomas McCormick is currently Chief Engineer/Technologist at Swissbit, where he leads market focused R&D for product development and full life cycle support. He has over twenty years experience designing PC and embedded computer systems, including over fifteen years focused on flash memory product research and development. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University. His on-going research is focused on flash memory and next generation non-volatile memory systems for highly reliable storage in embedded applications. He has presented at Flash Memory Summit, the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop, and has published an article on embedded flash in EE Times. He also holds an MBA and an MS in Computing Engineer from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MSME and BSME (summa cum laude) from Drexel University.
At Samsung, David McIntyre focuses on Computational Storage acceleration solutions development, as well as strategic business enablement for cloud-to-edge applications which include AI inference/video analytics, database processing, and blockchain networks. He is active with SNIA, where he serves as Chair of the Computational Storage SIG and the Persistent Memory and Computational Storage Summit.
Besides at Samsung, David has held senior management positions with IBM, Xilinx, Intel (formerly Altera), and at a few Silicon Valley startups. He has consulted for institutional investors, including Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and UBS. David is a frequent presenter and chairperson at Flash Memory Summit and other technical conferences.
Mike McKean is President at Encore Semi, a design services firm focused on ASIC and firmware/software design and development. He has over 35 years experience in the semiconductor and systems industries, including 25 years in data storage contributing to the successful hardware and firmware execution of multiple HDD, SDD, and consumer electronics projects.
Mike is a regular presenter, chairperson, and organizer at FMS, with roots going back to the Storage Visions era. He earned an MBA from the Univ. of Texas at Austin, and a BS in Engineering Science from Trinity Univ. in Texas. He resides in the hill country region southwest of Austin, TX.
Pankaj Mehra is Founder of Elephance, a company developing powerful new software concepts for disaggregated memory. Pankaj has held executive positions in the Memory industry since 2013 when he took over as CTO of Fusion-io, later serving as VP and Senior Fellow at both acquirers SanDisk and Western Digital. He became an HP Distinguished Technologist in 2004 for his pioneering work on RDMA-attached persistent memory devices and filesystems. Later he founded HP Labs Russia and served as its Chief Scientist until 2010. Pankaj's international experience spans academia, industry and government. His publications include 3 books and over 100 papers and patents. Pankaj holds Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
J Metz is Chair of SNIA's Board of Directors. At AMD, he coordinates and leads strategy on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture. He is recognized as a leading storage networking expert, and is an evangelist for storage-related technology. J has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies, and he is passionate about the inner workings and applications of emerging technologies.
J has previously held roles in both startup and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO, R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups at SNIA, Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and the NVMe Working Group. J is an entertaining presenter and prolific writer, has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, and has written over 300 articles. He earned his PhD from the Univ. of Georgia.
Rupin Mohan leads a global R&D team responsible for product development and CTO of Storage Networking products. He has been granted 14 patents, filed 30+ patents and has a proven track record of delivering outstanding storage products and driving business results. Rupin completed his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a Board Member and Marketing Chairman for FCIA. He also holds a MS in Engineering from Tufts University and BE in Computer Engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology. Rupin has been recognized as a thought leader and is a sought after and award-winning speaker in the storage industry.
Federica Monsone has over 25 years of experience helping vendors in the data storage and data protection industries build winning brands. Her company's more than 150 clients in this space include 3PAR, Acronis, CA, Cohesity, Data Domain, Emulex, Fujitsu, HPE, Infinidat, Micron, Nutanix, Scality, Spectra Logic, Texas Memory Systems, and Zadara Storage. Federica founded A3 Communications in 2003, and her agency runs the number one event for IT influencers: Technology Live! She is also the host of the influencer and CMO podcast 'Who do you think you are?' and is Advisor to the SNIA EMEA Board of Directors.
Anu Murthy is a seasoned executive with experience in architecture, strategy, marketing and business development. She has a keen ability to embrace and drive technology so that it has a profound impact on the industry. Anu has also held key positions at Seagate, Toshiba, SanDisk, and Samsung.
Tinh Ngo has 20 years of experience in the storage (NAND/SSD) and memory (DRAM, MCP, NVDIMM) markets, and has supported these technologies in industrial, aerospace, and satellite applications where size, weight, and power are key requirements. Prior to Virtium, he has held executive positions at Sanmina, Viking Technology, Netlist, and STEC/WD. Tinh has also supported the memory and flash industries by way of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI), and as a speaker and session chair at events including FMS.
Andy Pan is Marketing Analyst at Montage Technology. He is a member of the CXL Consortium and PCI-SIG marketing groups, and is Executive Director of FNPL (Foundation for National Political Leadership). Andy holds an MPA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Mr. Pappas has over 30 years of industry experience with building, running and managing dozens of successful industry associations and cross-industry initiatives. He is currently Chairman of the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, BoD Director of SNIA, and co-Chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Jim was also a Founding Director of the PCI Special Interest Group and of The Green Grid, as well as Founding Chairman of the USB Implementers Forum.
Uma M Parepalli is a senior level architecture, global engineering, product and program management leader in enterprise, cloud and data center servers, storage, networking, real-time embedded systems, and consumer electronics domains. Uma is currently working on a startup and was previously with Marvell, SK hynix, Broadcom, Dell EMC, Intel, and other global industry leaders in senior level roles. Uma was previously the D&I employee group chair at Dell EMC and Intel. Uma is a computer engineering graduate from University of Mysore.
Tom's 30+ years of experience in the storage industry spans magnetic, optical, and solid-state technologies, and includes research through product development. Tom most recently worked in Microsoft's Azure Hardware Strategy and Planning group. He has also worked at Micron, AMD, and in Dell's Office of the CTO, and he has served on technical committees as well as Boards of Directors at SATA-IO and the Blu-ray Disc Association. Tom holds BS-EE, MS-EE, and MBA degrees, and has been awarded multiple patents.
Lee Prewitt has over 30 years of storage industry experience, ranging from Magneto-Optical to HDDS to Flash. He works in Microsoft's Azure Hardware group where his team is responsible for future Data Center storage initiatives, specifications, and evangelization. Lee's flash responsibilities have included storage devices ranging from SD and UFS in mobile to NVMe in Enterprise and Data Centers. He has also worked in the Windows and Devices Group where he was responsible for many of the components in the storage stack. including File Systems, Spaces, Storport and Microsoft's inbox miniport drivers.
Renu Raman's focus is on the intersection of the next generation hardware and VMware's roadmap. He was previously VP of SAP's Cloud Architecture & Engineering where he was responsible for computing and storage platforms, and he had a dual role of both architecting and managing the development and delivery of SAP's compute and storage infrastructure.
Prior to taking on the role of V.P. of Business Development, Wayne was Radian's first advisor and helped build out the company's extended leadership team and strategic initiatives. Wayne has been a pioneer in storage networking, working hands on with the early versions of fibre channel and initiating standardization efforts through industry consortiums such as SNIA and FCIA. He was Co-Founder and held V.P. of Engineering and CTO roles at Gadzoox Networks, an early leader in fibre channel SAN switches. As a Director of Engineering at Emulex, Wayne led an Advanced Technology group that developed the industry's first fibre channel HBA. He has held V.P. and division Chief Technologist positions at Seagate and been an Advisory Board member at PMC Sierra.
WebFeet Research
Gil Russell is Principal Analyst at Semiscape, an IT consulting firm he founded in July 2005. Mr. Russell specializes in dynamic and non-volatile memory technologies and their application in memory storage systems. He has participated in JEDEC standards committees since 1992 and is the architect of Reduced Latency DRAM. Previously, he managed new product definition activities; participated as a team member of new product development engineering groups; technical lead of new product introductions; technical interface and technical liaison to external partnerships at Infineon Technologies, Siemens Microelectronics, Samsung Semiconductor & NEC.
Allen Samuels is a Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services where he leads development within In-Memory Databases. He was previously an Engineering Fellow at SanDisk and Western Digital where he directed software development for system level products. Allen also served as Chief Architect at Weitek Corp. and Citrix, and founded several companies including AMKAR Consulting, Orbital Data Corporation, and Cirtas Systems. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rice University.
Sanhita Sarkar is a Global Director Analytics at Western Digital, where she focuses on software design and development of analytical features and solutions spanning edge, data center, data lake, and cloud. She has expertise in key vertical markets such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Defense and intelligence, Financial Services, Genomics, and Healthcare. Sanhita previously worked at Teradata, SGI, Oracle, and several startups. She was responsible for overseeing design, development, and delivery of optimized software and solutions involving large memory, scale-up, and scale-out systems. Sanhita has authored four patents, published several papers, and spoken at several conferences. She received her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Leah Schoeb is a Sr Developer Relations Manager in the platform architecture team at AMD, where she engages with solid state storage vendors on storage technology futures. She has over 25 years of experience in the computer industryShe was previously Acting Director Reference Architecture at Intel, where she led a team of segment managers and architects managing cross functional teams for flash and NVMe based data solutions, and reference architectures in major cloud and enterprise solution design assignments. She has held management and engineering positions at VMware, Dell, and Sun Microsystems, and was also a Senior Partner at the analyst firm Evaluator Group, where she focused on storage, virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. Leah has ten publications on such subjects as optimizing Oracle, automated tiering, and solid state performance specifications, and has presented at many technical conferences. She currently serves as the Industry Trends Chairperson for Flash Memory SummitShe earned an MBA at the University of Phoenix and a BSEE at the University of Maryland, College Park.
At Solidigm, Scott Shadley's current focus is in efforts to drive adoption of new storage technology. He has spent over 25 years in the semiconductor and storage space, including in production, engineering, R&D, and also in customer-focused roles involving Marketing and Strategy. Scott has been a key figure in promoting SNIA as a second-term Board member where he leads the computational storage efforts as a Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Working Group. He participates in several industry efforts including Open Compute and NVM Express, and he is a subject matter expert in SSD technology and semiconductor design.
While at NGD Systems, Scott developed and managed Computational Storage products. At Micron, he managed the Product Marketing team, the Business Line Manager for the SATA SSD portfolio, and was the Principal Technologist for the SSD and emerging memory portfolio. Scott earned a BSEE in Device Physics from Boise State University, and an MBA from the Univ. of Phoenix.
Marc Staimer is the founder, senior analyst and CDS at Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Ore. The consulting practice has focused on the areas of strategic planning, product development and market development. With more than 30 years of marketing, sales and business experience in infrastructure, storage, server, software and virtualization, Marc is considered one of the industry's leading experts.
Ken Steinhardt serves as Field CTO at Infinidat. He has held many different roles in the IT industry over the last 49 years, having started as a mainframe applications programmer and systems analyst, part-time when he was still in high school. After receiving his BS degree in Computer Science from WPI, Ken was at Digital Equipment Corporation for 16 years, EMC Corporation for 20 years, and joined Infinidat from Pure Storage. His longest-tenured role was as EMC's Vice President of Enterprise Storage & CTO for Global Product Sales.
Maurice (Mo) Steinman has enjoyed a career of over 35 years in the tech industry, having worked for Digital, Compaq, HP, and Intel, and as Sr. Fellow at AMD. A veteran of many successful tape-outs and product introductions, Mo has expertise in SoC architecture, SoC interconnect, memory subsystems, and energy management. He has a BS in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and is a named inventor on over 50 US patents.
Robert Thibadeau is a computational cognitive neuroscientist who is also one of the six Founding Directors of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a long history of intelligent storage systems designs including the primary inventor of Self-Encrypting Drive Technology now deployed globally by all major storage producers. He spent about a decade working for Seagate Technology, LLC to produce the first such drives and head the effort to develop the international standards through www.trustedcomputinggroup.org. More recently he has returned to his AI/ML/NLP origins to extend our understanding of computational models for human-grade recognition of content in devices employing large amounts of non-volatile storage with applications in areas such as autonomous vehicles.
Andy Walls is Chief Architect and CTO for IBM's Flash Systems, and an IBM Fellow, IBM's most prestigious Honor. He is a pioneer in enabling MLC, TLC and QLC flash in the enterprise, and has shaped the IBM storage portfolio to be highly differentiated and popular. Andy was responsible for the Texas Memory Acquisition, he defined the architecture for the IBM's Flash System 840, 900 and Flash Core modules, and he leads the architecture and definition of the Entire FlashSystems end-to-end NVMe product portfolio including FS 5200, 7300, 9500. Andy is also defining next generation products that can be used in Hybrid Cloud environments. He has over 120 patents, has worked for IBM for his entire 40-year career, and has been an FMS presenter for well over a decade.
Hiroshi Watanabe, PhD, is a professor teaching flash memory and semiconductor technologies in dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He has published many journal & conference papers and invented more than 150 granted patents all over the world (including more than 60 US granted). Until 2010, he had worked for Toshiba's Headquarter RD Center and been engaged in the reliability study of several electron devices including NAND Flash. He received PhD in theoretical physics in 1994 from U. Tsukuba, Japan. In 2023, he founded IEEE Taipei Blockchain Group and has been Co-Chair of it. He is a technical advisor of Beyond Blockchain, Inc. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
Mark Webb is Principal/Consultant at MKW Ventures Consulting LLC. He is currently working in the areas of SSD and semiconductor technology and competitive analysis as well as SSD business and market development. Mark works with SSD OEM and ODM companies, storage providers, controller companies, and semiconductor manufacturers.
Jeannette Wilson has held various product management and marketing positions in the semiconductor industry, including positions with Intel and Freescale prior to joining Microchip. She has a passion for planning, launches, managing relationships, team leadership, and creating value to drive growth and expansion. Jeannette has a BS in EE from the Univ. of New Mexico, and an MBA and Certified Professional Coach certificate.
Jeff Yang is a Principal Engineer in the Algorithms & Technology team at Silicon Motion. He has performed extensive research in error correcting codes, previously for encoding/decoding algorithms and VLSI architectures, and currently for NAND flash applications. Jeff's previous work included several Wi-Fi projects at Realtek, Inc., and his PhD in EE is from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan.
Yafei Yang is CEO and Co-founder of DapuStor, a startup roviding enterprise SSDs, data protection, and edge computing products. He is an expert in intelligent computing, data storage, and product security, with many years of research and management experience in the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining DapuStor, he worked at Qualcomm on product security strategy, including smartphone, IoT, automotive, router, and server chipsets. Yang obtained his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Rhode Island. He has published over 20 technical articles and holds many granted US patents.
Jim is responsible for ecosystem, market, product, and business development at Macronix America. His 30 years of experience in the high tech sector included engineering, product marketing management, and business development for organizations focused on semiconductor, communications, and embedded software markets. Jim holds a MBA from St. Edwards University in Austin, and a BS in EET and Computer Science from Chapman University in Orange, CA.
Jung Yoon is Distinguished Engineer & CTO of Supplier Technology & Quality, IBM Supply Chain. He leads a worldwide supply chain engineering team focusing on semiconductor technologies used across all IBM Systems and products. He is a recognized industry leading expert in DRAM, flash memory, SSDs, and semiconductor devices in general, and drives technology convergence between industry capabilities and IBM's strategic product offerings. He has presented papers at many conferences including several past Flash Memory Summits. He earned a PhD in materials science from Columbia University and an MS in materials science from University of California Berkeley. He is a member of the Flash Memory Summit's Conference Advisory Board and has chaired key technical sessions over the last seven years.
Willie Nelson - Program Chair
Chuck Sobey – Conference Chair
Brian A. Berg – Conference Technical Chair
Jay Kramer – Business Chairperson and Emcee
Jim Handy – Sr Program Advisor
Jianjun ("Jerome") Luo
Camberley Bates
Kat Pate
W. David Schwaderer
Shawn Adams
Wayne Adams
Mike Amidi
Dmytro Apalkov
JB Baker
Stephen Bates
Matias Bjørling
Paul Borrill
Jean S. Bozman
Cameron Brett
Allan J. Cantle
Craig Carlson
Joseph Chen
Tejas Chopra
Ken Clipperton
Christopher Cox
Rob Davis
Jithendra Devegowd
David Duffin
Dave Eggleston
Mohamad El-Batal
Robin England
Rich Fetik
Tom Friend
John Geldman
Javier González
Abel Gordon
Dr. Kiran Gunnam
Purush Gupta
Rohit Gupta
Jonmichael Hands
Erich Haratsch
Troy Hegr
Justin Heindel
Steffen Hellmold
Andy Higginbotham
Jonathan Hinkle
Andy Hsu
Xinde Hu
Syed S. Hussain
Jeff Janukowicz
Pedram Khalili
John F. Kim 
Axel K. Kloth
Marilyn Kushnick
Dave Landsman
Chris Lyon
Andy Marken
Howard Marks
Bill Martin
Tom McCormick
David McIntyre
Mike McKean
Pankaj Mehra
J Metz
Rupin Mohan
Federica Monsone
Anu Murthy
Tinh Ngo
Andy Pan
Jim Pappas
Uma Parepalli
Tom Pratt
Lee Prewitt
Renu Raman
Wayne Rickard
Gil Russell
Allen Samuels
Sanhita Sarkar
Leah Schoeb
Scott Shadley 
Marc Staimer
Ken Steinhardt
Maurice "Mo" Steinman
Rob Thibadeau
Andy Walls
Hiroshi Watanabe
Mark Webb
Jeannette Wilson
Jeff Yang
Yafei Yang
Jim Yastic
Jung Yoon
