— Seattle tech veteran David Aronchick is the new CEO of Expanso, the company he co-founded to promote adoption of the Bacalhau project.
Expanso provides managed services on top of Bacalhau, an open-source platform that enables efficient and secure distributed computation.
Aronchick is known for his expertise and vision in distributed computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He was previously the lead product manager for Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine at Google, and head of Open Source Machine Learning Strategy at Microsoft.
Aronchick said his primary goal as Expanso CEO is to augment Bacalhau’s impact within the AI community, “to expedite the project’s development and make AI tools more accessible to a broader range of businesses.”
— Seattle-based sales software startup Highspot has named Graham Younger as its new president of field operations.
Younger will be responsible for driving revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. He has more than 20 years experience at a variety of SaaS companies.
Younger was most recently president and chief commercial officer for Cast & Crew, a provider of production software, payroll and services for the entertainment industry. He was also executive vice president of worldwide field operations at Box, where he helped lead the company’s IPO.
— Meta and Microsoft veteran technology leader Brad Booth joined the board of directors at NLM Photonics. Booth brings extensive experience with data centers (cloud and AI) and has been a critical player in ethernet standardization. He holds of over 20 patents related to networking technologies.
— Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is making some changes to its board of directors. Pete Shimer, CEO at Deloitte, has been added to the board, effective July 1. Leigh Morgan, chief strategy and operating officer at the Nia Tero Foundation, has been appointed the new chair, following Kathy Surace-Smith as most recent board chair. Sean Boyle, chief operating officer of AI startup Omniva, is moving into the vice chair position.
— Fred Hutch announced that Dr. Sara Hurvitz will be the senior vice president of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutch and the head of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Washington Department of Medicine. Currently the director of the Breast Oncology Program at UCLA, Hurvitz begins her new role Aug. 1.
— Two Fred Hutch virus researchers have been awarded prestigious grants. Dr. Lillian Cohn was named a Pew Biomedical Scholar for her research into ways to cure HIV/AIDS. Dr. Daniel Blanco-Melo was named a Searle Scholar, and he’s been exploring how viruses evolve, and how the human immune response to them changes over time.
