Leadership

Louis Parks – Chairman and CEO

Mr. Parks is a co-founder of Veridify, and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. He also serves on the company’s Board of Directors and is its Chairman. Prior to joining Veridify, Mr. Parks was the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Global Logistics Technology, Inc. (“G-Log”), an innovative Internet logistics company that was acquired by Oracle Corporation. For 10 years preceding G-Log, he was CEO/President of Client Technologies, Inc., a New York-based provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications for the financial sector that was acquired by a Canadian company. Mr. Parks also served as President of RKO/Warner Video, where he was responsible for technology, operations, and acquisitions throughout North America. Early in his career, he held both sales and engineering positions with IBM.

Mr. Parks has consulted to Homeland Security on US electronic border initiatives and has served as a resource to the White House on security issues related to electronic passports and passport cards. He was on the North American Board of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) and is the former chairman of its RFID Experts Group (REG). He was on the Board of Advisors of the National Center for Aerospace Leadership (NCAL), a partnership between US industry, academia, and government teams. Mr. Parks holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree (with Honors) in Finance and Marketing from the University of Manitoba.

Derek Atkins – Chief Technology Officer

Mr. Atkins, Chief Technology Officer, specializes in architecting, designing, developing, and deploying network and systems security applications. He was formerly a senior member of the technical staff at Mocana Corporation, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Symantec (formally PGP Corporation), Senior Research Scientist at Telcordia Technologies (Bellcore), Chief Technology Officer at Arepa, Inc. (Into Networks), and a member of the technical staff at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Atkins also served as President of IHTFP Consulting, Inc., an Atlanta-based consulting firm he founded in 2001, which provided Internet and computer system security services.

Mr. Atkins is the Vice-Chair of the RISC-V Crypto Extensions Work Group. He also serves on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet standardization body. As a member of the IETF, he was instrumental in the design and standardization of several major Internet protocols, including the OpenPGP and Instant Messaging protocols. He currently serves on the IETF’s Security Directorate. Mr. Atkins formerly served as chairman of the Open Web Authorization (Oauth), Kerberized Internet Negotiation of Keys, and the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Working Groups, and as a security guru on the IETF’s Domain Name System Directorate.

Mr. Atkins holds several patents in the area of secure content delivery. Publications authored by Mr. Atkins include “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage” in AsiaCrypt ’94, “Scaling the Web of Trust: Combining Kerberos and PGP to Provide Large Scale Authentication” published at Usenix 1995, and “Media Bank: Access and Access Control” published in 1995 by the MIT Media Lab. Mr. Atkins earned his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Iris Anshel – Chief Scientist

Dr. Anshel is an accomplished mathematician and cryptographer who invented and developed the foundational group theoretic methods that underlie all Veridify protocols along with Dr. Dorian Goldfeld and Dr. Michael Anshel. In addition to extensive research and publishing, she has experience in the commercialization of security technology. As a co-founder of Arithmetica, she was responsible for documenting methods for commercial deployment of new cryptography protocols, including the AAG Braid Group Cryptosystem, and she supported sales and business development activity. She is the co-inventor of the core Group Theoretic Cryptography methods used and developed by Veridify and is a co-author of the patents on these cryptographically secure methods.

Dr. Anshel earned a Master’s degree and Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University. She received a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree from City College of New York. Dr. Anshel also served as a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Drake Smith – Vice President of Development

Mr. Smith, Vice President of Development, is an industry veteran with over 30 years of experience designing, manufacturing and marketing technology products and services. He also served as Chief Technology Officer for the National Captioning Institute and as President and Chief Operating Officer for ULTECH Corporation, a broadcast technology company he founded in 1991, which was acquired by NCI in 2002.

Previously, Mr. Smith was an Applications Engineer and Technical Services Manager for ITT Semiconductors, where he was responsible for the design and development of integrated circuits. Mr. Smith holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a Master's degree in Software Engineering from Brandeis University.

Brian A. Marks (JD/PhD) – Administration, Compliance, and Regulatory Affairs

Mr. Marks focuses on compliance and regulatory affairs, and administrative matters. He has over 25 years of professional operational experience managing administration, finance, human resources, information technology, and legal and regulatory affairs with start-up and emerging US and international growth companies. He formerly held senior executive positions at various technology companies. Mr. Marks worked with PrismTech Group Limited, Edinburgh, Scotland, where he served as a Commercial Director and Counsel, and orchestrated that company’s ability to work on classified US Department of Defense projects through its US subsidiary. Prior to PrismTech, he served as the Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and General Counsel at Global Logistics Technologies, Inc., a global logistics software company, where he negotiated with the Chief Executive Officer its sale to Oracle Corporation in 2005. He also has advised and performed consulting and policy analysis related to information security and privacy, along with associated policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines for firms within the entertainment, financial services, health care, insurance, logistics, real estate, technology, and pharmaceutical industries. Mr. Marks also served as an attorney in private practice, and held the position of Special Assistant, Legal and Economic Advisor, to the Honorable Robert R. Davis, Commissioner, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Mr. Marks is also on staff at the University of New Haven where he is the Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Program and a Practitioner-in-Residence for the Department of Economics & Business Analytics in the College of Business where he teaches economics and strategy, and advises undergraduate and graduate students in business. He has held academic positions at the John F. Welch College of Business and the Department of Government and Politics at Sacred Heart University, the Economic Division at the Babson College, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Bridgeport, Graduate School of Economics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institution & State University, the Center for Political Economy at Washington University, and the Domestic Studies Program at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Mr. Marks earned his Doctorate of Law, Doctorate in Philosophy, and Master of Arts in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Union College where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Epsilon. Mr. Marks is a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia and previously held a clearance with the US government. He has published and presented research related to corporate governance and political economy.

Joanne C. Kelleher – Vice President of Operations

Ms. Kelleher, Vice President of Operations, focuses on operations and administration, including partners programs, recruiting, grant writing, grant administration, and logistics. She was formerly the Director of Marketing and continues to assist in company marketing operations. She has broad range of experience working with technology companies in the B2B space. Ms. Kelleher previously served as Director of Marketing at Imaging Solutions, Inc. and as Director of Marketing and Human Resources at Pinnacle Decision Systems, Inc., which was acquired by Tallan. She has experience as a project manager, systems trainer, and user systems analyst at a large property-casualty insurance company. She also serves as the executive director of a local non-profit and is active on several boards and committees within her community.

Ms. Kelleher earned her Master of Business Administration in Finance and her Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Michael Anshel – Founder and Advisor

Dr. Michael Anshel, Co-Founder and Advisor, is a security thought-leader and world-class mathematician with expertise in the field of cryptography. He has published and lectured extensively on new key agreement protocols and braid group cryptography. Dr. Anshel’s work, in association with Dr. Goldfeld, has included the introduction of a new intractable problem, distinct from integer factorization or the discrete log problem, that leads to a new class of one-way functions based on the theory of zeta functions, and against which there is no known attack. Dr. Anshel has recently delivered crypto-related presentations to MSRI (Berkley) Workshop on Number-theoretic Cryptography, RSA 2001, and the 8th International Wigner Symposium 2003.

Dr. Anshel has authored and co-authored numerous papers in the area public-key cryptography and is the co-inventor of five patents in the area of cryptography, zeta-one-way functions, and braid group.

Dr. Anshel has received numerous fellowships and honors, including the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Award 1985, a NASA-ASEE Faculty Fellowship 1982, 1983, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship 1963-1966. He has consulted with several corporations including AT&T Bell Laboratories 1986-1987, Delphic Associates 1983, Mathematica 1968, and Lambda Corp 1968 where he worked with the late Hugh Everett III a pioneer in quantum theory, game theory and discrete optimization. He is currently participating in an ATP-NIST funded Project involving Secure Email through The City University Graduate School.

Dr. Anshel is a member of the AMS, MAA, ACM, IEEE, and IACR. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude, Master of Science degree and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at The City College of New York.

You can learn more about Dr. Anshel at in the CUNY faculty directory or his web site.

Dr. Dorian Goldfeld – Founder and Advisor

Dr. Dorian Goldfeld, Co-Founder and Advisor at Veridify, is a world-class mathematician who has published and lectured internationally on a wide range of cryptographic topics and methods. Dr. Goldfeld was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkley and did post-doctoral work at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and has held professor (associate and visiting) positions at Harvard University, M.I.T., Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy), and The University of Texas (Austin).

Honor societies and awards include a Sloan Fellow, the Cole Prize in Number Theory and the Vaughn Prize. Dr. Goldfeld has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant every year since 1976. In 2009 he was inducted as a Fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Dr. Goldfeld has lectured at over 27 conferences around the world and has published over 50 papers on cryptography and mathematics topics including applications of elliptic curves, quadratic fields, zeta functions, public-key cryptography, and group theoretic approaches to public-key cryptography. Dr. Goldfeld has edited and/or authored four books and has been the organizer of numerous conferences around the world.

He is the co-inventor of several patents in the areas of multistream encryption systems, high-speed cryptography, and cryptographically secure algebraic key establishment protocols based on monoids.

Dr. Goldfeld received a BS from the School of Engineering and a PhD. from Columbia University. He has been a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at Columbia since 1985 and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

You can learn more about Dr. Goldfeld at his Wikipedia listing and on his home page at Columbia University.

Dr. Paul Gunnells – Advisor

Dr. Paul Gunnells, Advisor, is a highly respected mathematician who has published and lectured on a wide variety topics, including cryptography, algebraic geometry, and number theory. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), where he has taught since 2002. Dr. Gunnells was a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2012 and a Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany in 2001.

Prior to teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Gunnells was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University (2000-2002), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College (1999-2000), an Assistant Professor at Columbia University (1995-1999), and an instructor at Tufts University. Dr. Gunnells's research interest is in number theory.

Dr. Gunnells holds a BS from Stanford University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tim Dierks – Board Member and Advisor

Mr. Dierks, Advisor and Board Member, has more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing cryptographic solutions for securing communications, with extensive knowledge of wireless communication and efficient cryptography for embedded and constrained platforms. Mr. Dierks has contributed to the development of the Algebraic Eraser and Veridify’s other products.

Mr. Dierks is currently an Engineering Manager at Google overseeing the security and privacy engineering teams. Mr. Dierks was the Chief Technology Officer at Huffington Post Media Group. He was formerly the Senior Staff Engineer, Tech Lead and Manager at Google he worked on internal security systems, oversaw multiple engineering teams and founded and developed the company’s Google Checkout offering, the predecessor to Google Wallet.

As the Chief Technology Officer of Certicom Corporation and the VP of Engineering at Consensus Development (which was acquired by Certicom) he implemented the first two versions of SSL Plus and extended the technology into the WTLS and IPSec protocols. He was on the Internet Engineering Task Force where he served as the editor for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) working group and he participated in other standards efforts. Tim started his career at SLR Data and Apple.

Mr. Dierks has presented in a number of forums, including the RSA Data Security conference, the Public Key Solutions conference, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, IETF and other standards bodies, and other conferences. He has written a variety of published materials, including white papers, standards effort submissions and standards, and journal articles. He has multiple patents and pending patent applications in diverse areas: mobile device security, using big data in web advertising analysis, payment transactions, web application architecture, and ad effectiveness surveys.

He received his Bachelor in Science in Electrical Engineering from The University of Notre Dame.

Barry Guld - Board Member

Mr. Guld is an entrepreneur, advisor, founder and investor in healthcare and technology companies. He started his career at IBM, moving on as founder of Zadall Systems (now part of McKesson) and as a co-founder or investor in several HealthIT companies including pc/1, PDX, eRx. He is the founder and CEO of Methylation Sciences Inc., a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company. Mr. Guld manages investments for his investment company, Ladaz Technologies, Inc. and he is currently a director of the Mark Anthony Group, owner of wineries and brands such as White Claw and Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a director of Prescryptive, a HealthIT SaaS platform designed to massively disrupt drug delivery and improve wellness.