David Issacs
Vice President, Government Affairs
Semiconductor Industry Association
David Isaacs is vice president of government affairs at SIA, where he is responsible for all aspects of the association’s work related to government policy and advocacy before the U.S. Congress, the Executive Branch, and international organizations.
Before joining SIA, David was senior vice president, government relations of Solazyme Inc., a leading renewable energy startup based in South San Francisco, California. In that capacity he was responsible for securing government support to advance Solazyme’s commercialization and research objectives. He previously served as director, government affairs for Hewlett-Packard Company, where he led the D.C. office and directed a global team on HP’s technology, environmental, energy policy, and other priority policy matters. He was an associate at the law firm of Beveridge & Diamond, P.C. in Washington, D.C., and started his career as a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.
Sean Eilert
Fellow, Emerging Memory & Memory System Optimization Technology Pathfinding Group
Micron
Sean Eilert is a Micron Fellow in the Technology Pathfinding Group performing research at the intersection of emerging memories and the systems that will utilize them. Sean has held numerous engineering development roles ranging from test development, reliability, media management, design, architecture, system architecture, system design and system characterization. Sean’s interests lie in memory architectures, system architectures, and the interactions between them with special interest in media management and in-memory compute. An innovator by nature, Sean holds over 40 memory, compute-in-memory and system-related patents.
Heike Riel
IBM Fellow, Head Science & Technology
IBM Research
Heike Riel is IBM Fellow, Head of Science & Technology and Lead of IBM Research Quantum Europe & Africa. She leads the research and operation of the Science & Technology department aiming to create scientific and technological breakthroughs in Quantum Computing and Technologies, Physics of Artificial Intelligence, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and to explore new directions to computing. She is a distinguished expert in nanotechnology and nanosciences and focuses her research on advancing the frontiers of information technology through the physical sciences. She received the PhD in physics from University of Bayreuth and an MBA from Henley Business College (UK). She has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and filed more than 50 patents and has received several honors, e.g., the APS David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics, APS Fellow, elected member of the Leopoldina – German National Academy of Sciences and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences; an honorary doctorate by Lund University.
Carolyn R. Duran
Vice President, Data Platforms Group
Engineering Manager, Memory and I/O Technologies
Intel
Carolyn R. Duran is a vice president in the Data Center and AI Group and engineering manager of Memory and I/O Technologies at Intel Corporation. She is responsible for a broad scope including pathfinding, architecture, validation, and standards development. She leads the teams driving these critical technologies from early definition, through development, to broad industry enablement.
Duran joined Intel in 1998 as a process engineer in research and development, then moving to supply chain management in 2007, and most recently to the Data Platforms Group in 2017. Prior to her current role, Carolyn was the supply chain sustainability director within Intel’s Global Supply Chain organization, in which she oversaw Intel’s supply chain sustainability efforts including chemical regulations and policy, human rights, labor and ethics practices, supplier diversity, and the company’s responsible minerals sourcing program.
Duran is currently serving as the 2021 Vice President of the Materials Research Society and is an adjunct professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. Additionally, she has held chair positions for both the Responsible Business Alliance board of directors and the Conflict Free Sourcing Initiative (now the Responsible Minerals Initiative). A recognized industry leader, Duran was named on Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business 1000” list in 2016 and ranked no. 2 on Business Insider’s “Most Powerful Women Engineers in the World” list in 2014. Duran received her bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and her Ph.D. in the same field from Northwestern University. She holds five patents in the area of semiconductor process engineering.
David Pellerin
Head of Worldwide Business Development for Infotech/Semiconductor
Amazon Web Services
David Pellerin has spent nine years at Amazon Web Services, focusing on high performance computing applications and on the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining AWS, Mr. Pellerin had a career in electronic design automation, FPGA-accelerated computing, and embedded systems. He has published five books on topics related to digital design, high-level synthesis, and programmable logic.
Steffen Hellmold
Senior Vice President, Business Development for Data Storage
Twist Bioscience
Mr. Hellmold joined Twist in October 2021, bringing more than 25 years of industry experience in product, technology as well as business development roles in semiconductor memory and data storage. He will be responsible for promoting, educating and driving market awareness and reception for DNA data storage. His expertise includes driving product roadmap leadership and establishing strategic relationships with ecosystem stakeholders to fuel the adoption of DNA data storage solutions across existing and emerging archive storage use cases. Before joining Twist, Mr. Hellmold was Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development for Strategic Initiatives at Western Digital. Prior to Western Digital, Mr. Hellmold 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.
Jing (Jane) Li
Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering and of Computer and Information Science
The University of Pennsylvania
Jing (Jane) Li is the Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering and of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is broadly interested in developing fundamental methods for workload optimized systems, with a special focus on memory and storage. To validate the research ideas, her research puts a strong emphasis on real system prototyping both at chip level and system level. She is the recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award, NSF Career Award, IBM Research Division Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for successfully achieving CEO milestone, multiple invention achievement awards and high value patent application awards from IBM. Previously she was the Dugald C. Jackson Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is one of the PIs in SRC JUMP center – Center for Research on Intelligent Storage and Processing-In-Memory (CRISP). She spent her early career at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member after obtaining her PhD degree from Purdue University.
Jesse Mee
Acting Mission Lead for Pervasive Technologies and Lead for Space Electronics Technologies
AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate
Jesse Mee is the Acting Mission Lead for Pervasive Technologies at the AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate. In this role, he helps define the Directorate-wide strategic vision and long-term goals for Pervasive Technologies and helps shape a portfolio of projects emphasizing game-changing spacecraft bus technologies in electronics, GNC, power, robotics, space logistics, structures, and thermal. Dr. Mee is also the Lead for Space Electronics Technologies directing a 20 person team (Mil/Civ/Ctrs) to execute a technical portfolio providing leading edge radiation-hardened electronics technologies for national security space and strategic systems. Jesse Mee earned his Ph.D. degree (awarded honor of distinction) in EE with a concentration in Optoelectronics from the University of New Mexico in 2013. Jesse’s doctoral research focused on investigating the time-domain characteristics of monolithic quantum dot passively mode-locked lasers for support of high data-rate transmission architectures. Jesse also earned a MS degree (with distinction) from UNM in 2010 for his research on a reliability degradation phenomenon known as Negative Bias Temperature Instability.
