Management

Pascal Van Hentenryck
President and CEO

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 earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Tennesse.

Sue Infante-Despo
Vice President of Finance

Sue brings more than 20 years of financial leadership experience to her position as vice president of finance at Dynadec. Sue is also currently the VP of finance at Nexaweb, where she is responsible for the management of the company’s administrative, financial, and human resource operations. Prior to joining Nexaweb in September 2006, Sue was the senior director of finance and administration at Amicore, where she was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company and was involved in its sale to Misys Healthcare Systems. Before her time at Amicore, she was vice president and corporate controller at Zaiq Technologies, and the finance, planning and analysis manager for Nortel Networks in the Enterprise Data Solutions Division. Sue has also held senior financial and accounting positions with Software House, a subsidiary of Sensormatic Electronics Corporation, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Sue earned her Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Assumption College and an MBA from Nichols College.

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.