Management

Jim Popeo
President & CEO

Jim brings over 25 years of experience as a senior executive in multiple industry segments including supply chain management, product life-cycle management, electronics manufacturing, and architectural, engineering, and construction.  Prior to joining Dynadec, Jim served as Executive Vice President at Exa Corporation, a computational fluid dynamics software company, for over ten years.  His leadership in the areas of corporate strategy and global sales and marketing contributed to the company's exponential growth and global expansion.  Jim has extensive experience growing early stage technology companies and broad based international experience.  He has held senior management positions at PDA Engineering, Sensitech, Unicam Software and Bricsnet.

Pascal Van Hentenryck
Chief Scientist

Pascal Van Hentenryck is a world-renowned leader in optimization technology. A professor of computer science at Brown University and the director of its optimization laboratory, Pascal is also a software engineer with a successful history of commercialization.  Before joining Brown in 1990, Pascal spent four years at the European Computer-Industry Research Center (ECRC), where he was the main designer and implementer of the CHIP programming system, the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems. Over the last 15 years, he developed a number of influential systems, including the Numerica system for global optimization; the optimization programming language OPL; and the programming language Comet, which supports both constraint-based local search, constraint programming and mathematical programming.  Pascal is a AAAI fellow, the recipient of the 1993 NSF National Young Investigator (NYI) award; the 2002 INFORMS ICS award for research excellence at the interface between computer science and operations research; the 2006 ACP for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming; the best paper awards at CP'03, CP'04, and IJCAI'07; and an IBM Faculty Award in 2004. He is the author of five books (all published by the MIT Press), and of more than 170 scientific papers. Pascal has an H-number of at least 40 in Google Scholar and his first MIT Press book has at least 1,300 citations.

Rob Williams
Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Rob brings over 15 years of software sales, management and marketing experience to Dynadec.  Prior to joining Dynadec, Rob was the vice president of sales and marketing at TotalView Technologies, the HPC industry's leading provider of debugging tools for complex, multi-threaded, parallel applications.  Previously, Rob was the director of geographic sales for North America and Latin America at The MathWorks, the world's leading technical software company.  During his tenure at The MathWorks, Rob's team grew annual revenue from $6 million to $75 million, and established new markets in financial services, biotechnology, and communications.  In addition to his North American responsibilities, Rob was based in EMEA in 2006, supporting offices in France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and The Netherlands in an advisory capacity.  Prior to The MathWorks, Rob was the corporate group sales manager at Course Technology, an eLearning industry pioneer.  Rob graduated with high honors from the University of Tennessee, where he earned a B.A. in Economics.

Laurent Michel
Vice President of Engineering

Laurent Michel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1999 and is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science  & Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. His collaboration with Pascal, which started in the mid nineties, gave birth to multiple systems including Numerica for Global Optimization, the Localizer system which was the first modeling language for local search,  the Optimization Programming Language OPL and the COMET Hybrid Optimization Platform. During the early nineties, he was principal engineer at CICADE, a Belgian cartography company, for their orthophoto GIS and he was product manager for OPL at Ilog, Inc in Paris in 2000. More recently he served as architect for the Tempo toolset, a formal language for specifying distributed systems with Timed Input/Ouput Automata developed in the context of an SBIR with VeroModo, Inc. He brings to Dynadec his expertise in programming language design, compilers and operating systems which he routinely teaches at UCONN. Laurent co-authored 2 books (published with MIT Press) and more than 60 papers, and he sits on the Editorial Board  of Constraints, Mathematical Programming Computation and Constraint Programming Letters. 

Charles Garcia
Vice President of Finance

Charlie Garcia has over 15 years experience as an executive and consultant building and executing growth plans in start-up, rapid growth and turn-around situations.  As a founder of the Odyssey Consulting Group, he has worked with venture backed information technology companies, as well as manufacturing and distribution organizations in a diverse number of industries.  Prior to joining Dynadec, Charlie was the CFO for adQ, a developer of innovative internet software for media companies.  Prior to adQ, he was the General Manager at Miller Golf, where he was hired and promoted as a key driver of its successful turn-around.  Charlie graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Hampshire with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and earned his MBA with high distinction from the University of Michigan Business School, where he was named Student Entrepreneur of the Year, and performed an in depth study of the Norwegian venture capital industry.