Leadership
Jupiter’s team of global business and technology leaders have world-renowned scientific backgrounds and extensive experience successfully commercializing new technologies.
Rich SorkinCEO
Co-founder
- 20 years commercializing new technologies
- Extensive experience with weather models, machine learning, sensor data and risk
- CEO, Zip2: Pioneering Internet GIS company, acquired by HP
- President, Kaggle: Pioneering machine learning company, acquired by Google
Eric WunCOO
Co-founder
- Senior operations executive with companies at the foundation of finance, Internet and machine learning
- Google, VISA International, Cybersource, Zip2, Corio, Vertical Response, Wells Fargo Bank
- Google’s Skybox (Terra Bella) Satellite Division
Betsy WeatherheadEarth and Oceans Systems
- Nobel Prize recipient, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
- Key contributor to IPCC Report for over 15 years
- Expert in climate change: forecast verification and model analysis
- Lead author for the first international assessment of Arctic climate change
Alan BlumbergEarth and Ocean Systems
Co-founder
- World renowned urban oceanographer, innovator of Predictive Modeling & Ocean Physics
- Developed Princeton Ocean Model (POM), used by over 5700 research and operational groups from 70 countries
- Led group that developed 2-hour to 4-day flood predictions for Port Authority of NY & NJ, and NJ Transit
Josh HackerEarth and Ocean Systems
Co-founder
- NCAR Director Joint Numerical Testbed Program, Science Lead for National Security Applications Program
- Along with university partners, led the containerization work in the NSF-funded Big Weather Web project
- Expert in weather and climate applications for DoD and NOAA
Matt SteinBusiness Development
- Head, Commercial Strategy & Developer Ecosystem, GE Digital
- Strategy Director, GE Digital
- CEO & Co-founder of Multitude (pollution IoT/analytics company, recently acquired)
Dinesh SharmaProduct Management
- Global VP SAP, Internet of Things
- Global VP SAP, Cloud Platforms, launched first in-memory cloud platform
- GM, AMD, Workstation Graphics Division
- Three time founder, two successful exits
Rahul DubeyProduct Engineering
- Deluxe Corporation, VP of Engineering and Operations
- Meltwater Group Software Architect
- Deep expertise with service oriented architecture, big data, search and machine learning technologies
Science, Technology, Enterprise and Public Sectors
Jupiter has gathered a world-class team of scientists and technology experts, including a Nobel Prize winner for climate change, the former head of Atmospheric Science at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the former head of Search Analytics at Google. Our team includes the first group in the world to improve weather forecasting scale and accuracy with elastic supercomputing.
Pat Harr
- Atmospheric Section Head, National Science Foundation (NSF), $120M budget, Federal Senior Executive Service
- Chair, American Meteorological Society (AMS) Committee on Hurricanes & Tropical Meteorology
Kevin Cei
- Over 11 years experience working with (re)insurance companies to enhance their enterprise risk management processes
- Led multiple solution implementation projects across 3 continents to accelerate adoption of a new risk management platform
- Previously served as Director of Client Solutions, RMS
Leah Cohen
- Expert in climate resilience and business continuity, US EPA, NYC Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, Bloomberg LP
- Chair, New York City’s Climate Change Adaptation Task Force
- Director of Climate Analysis, Mayor Bloomberg’s Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resilience following Hurricane Sandy
Jeff Ditty
- Developed and implemented flow forecast system; assisted New York State Canal Corporation with operating a large canal and reservoir network and disseminating important information during flood events
- Expert in Flood Early Warning System, Hydrologic Engineering Suite, Community Hydrologic Prediction System, and more
- Water Resource Engineer, RTI International
Scott Eilerman
- CIRES/NOAA, Participated in multiple phases of atmospheric science research: instrument construction and software development, field mission planning and execution, data QC and analysis, and manuscript authoring
- UW-Madison: Developed simulations and led experimental analysis that improved understanding of ion dynamics in turbulent plasmas
John Exby
- Led NCAR development for NSF funded Big Weather Web
- Containerized WRF and other models
- 16 years constructing HPC solutions
- Motivated by cloud initiatives coupling speed with science
Nickitas Georgas
- Led development of the world’s most precise medium-term probabilistic coastal flood prediction system, used by Port Authority of NY & NJ, and NJ Transit for their critical assets
- Developed numerical models to forecast hydrodynamics and water quality of inland and coastal waters
Vyacheslav Gomov
- System architect and team lead at software engineering companies including SAP, Oracle, and Capital One
- Expertise in cloud computing, transactional processing, and data management
- Extensive experience designing and building successful software solutions
Alexis Hoffman
- Data scientist at the nexus of climate, satellite, weather, and non-traditional data
- Experience in the satellite and aerospace industry
- Developed statistical crop models to understand the impact of mineral aerosols and other climate variables on yields
Antoni Jordi
- Parallelized the enhanced version of the Princeton Ocean Model
- Expertise in developing numerical and computational methods to efficiently process complex scientific simulations
- Leads ensemble analysis for New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System
Alicia Karspeck
- Research scientist, NCAR
- Discipline expert: ocean and coupled global ensemble data assimilation and near-term climate prediction
- Lead developer, NCAR, CESM/DART ensemble data assimilation system
- NOAA Global Change Fellow
- Chair, US CLIVAR Science Team on AMOC State and Change
Ramana Lokavarapu
- Principal Engineer/Senior Manager at global industry leaders including Capital One, VISA, and Intel
- Expertise in highly multi-threaded server side, service oriented and distributed micro-services architecture that includes resiliency, deployment aspects using Kubernetes
- Experienced programmer in functional programming, building data pipeline infrastructure using Kafka, Spark and No-SQL databases
Yaítza Luna-Cruz
- Led DoD DTRA Reachback Meteorological Team (24/7/365 operations, planning, research and development for federal and international support)
- Subject matter expert in CBRNE transport and dispersion modeling and critical real-world natural hazard modeling
- DTRA Reachback shift lead/Senior Atmospheric Physicist/meteorologist, and certified instructor at DTRA CBRNE Decision Support Training Program
Luke Madaus
- Data assimilation and numerical modeling of convective storms and their initiation
- NCAR ASP Postdoctoral Fellow
Patrick McDermott
- Developed novel statistical machine learning models for high-dimensional spatio-temporal processes
- Built Bayesian statistical models for seasonal forecasting of sea surface temperature, soil moisture, and precipitation
- Expert in statistical modeling of environmental fields, including climate, ecology, and atmospheric science
Julie Pullen
- Pioneered the coupling of ocean and atmosphere models, Naval Research Laboratory
- Headed multi-million-dollar DHS-funded National Center on Maritime Security
- Adjunct research scientist, Columbia Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- Adviser, DOE Brookhaven National Laboratory, Environmental & Climate Sciences Dept.
JS Rogers
- Expertise in ocean modeling and computational methods
- Discipline expert in ocean waves, bottom boundary layers, and storm surge
- First to develop mathematical framework for nesting high resolution nonhydrostatic ocean models
Steve Sain
- Data Scientist and Team Lead at The Climate Corporation
- Scientist and Section Head, Geophysical Statistics Project, Institute for Mathematics Applied to the Geosciences, NCAR
Firas Saleh
- Conducted a comprehensive risk assessment of urban flooding in Houston following Hurricane Harvey for NOAA
- Developed state-of-the-art hydrologic and coastal flood forecast systems for Port Authority of NY & NJ, and NJ Transit
Daniel Siegel
- Expert in GIS and Remote Sensing
- Managed Earth Observations content for Esri
- Helped build NOAA’s National Water Model
Craig Smith
- Developed downscaled climatology of explosive Wildfire events in California
- Expert Fire Weather Meteorologist at Pacific Gas and Electric
- Designed and constructed operational Numerical Weather Decision Support systems – Wildfire and Energy Meteorology
- Associate Research Professor at Desert Research Institute
Darren Weber
- Research scientist and software engineer with expertise in building robust and fault-tolerant data pipelines, including data quality filtering, ETL, and analytics
- Software engineer, Stanford University Libraries and Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research
- Work includes bioinformatics, statistics, molecular visualization, microscopy and human brain imaging
Elaine Yang
- Lead engineer for Weather Underground’s BestForecast System, which gathered global big data and used machine learning to produce Weather Underground’s forecast model
- Helped engineer Forecast On Demand for IBM’s Weather Company
- Experienced meteorologist and seasoned software engineer
Advisors
Jupiter’s advisors add enormous value through a wide range of skills and experience. They are business executives, scientists, public policy experts, and active participants in government climate work. The Jupiter team is honored to work with these acclaimed individuals.
Public and Private Sector Advisors
Neal WolinJupiter Co-founder
- Deputy Secretary of US Department of the Treasury
- President and COO of The Hartford’s property and casualty insurance companies
- Member, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board
Todd SternJupiter Co-founder
- United States Special Envoy for Climate Change
- United States Chief Negotiator, 2015 Paris Climate Agreement
- Senior White House Negotiator Kyoto Protocol and Buenos Aires
Jeff WeckerJupiter Co-founder
- Chief Data Officer, Goldman Sachs
- Chief Business Architect, Bridgewater
- Managing Director at Lehman
- Quant Strategies, Goldman Sachs
Katherine Greig
- Deputy Director, NYC Mayor’s Office of Recovery & Resilience
- Senior Policy Advisor, Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Taskforce
- Senior Fellow & Strategic Advisor, Wharton Risk Center
- Project Leader, Boston Consulting Group
Kyle Beatty
- Former SVP Verisk Analytics
- Former President Verisk Climate
- SVP Willis Re
- University of Oklahoma, Distinguished Corporate Scholar
- American Family Ventures, Principal
Joelle Kaufman
- 25 years B2B marketing leadership creating category-defining companies
- Over $1 billion in market capitalizations: Reactivity (Cisco), Adify (Cox), BloomReach, Dynamic Signal
- Expertise in big data, AI, ML, enterprise SaaS, security, digital media
John Marburger
- Expert tropical meteorologist and climatologist bridging the communication gap between scientists and policy makers
- Naval Officer, retired
- Co-Author, Department of Defense Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap; U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap; Regional Sea Level Scenarios for Coastal Risk Management
- Founding member of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental
Science and Technology Advisors
Radley Horton
- Lamont Associate Research Professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
- Convening Lead Author for the Third National Climate Assessment
- Co-Chairs Columbia’s Adaptation Initiative
Ken RudinJupiter Co-founder
- Google, Head of User Growth and Analysis
- Facebook, Head of Analytics & Data Science
- Zynga, Head of Analytics and Platform Technologies
Ari Gesher
- Palantir, 10 years
- Designed & built data source and data interchange
- Kairos, Director, Software Development
John Englander
- Author, High Tide On Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis
- Recognized subject matter expert with multiple Arctic and Antarctic Expeditions
- President of International Sea Level Institute
Board of Directors
Rich Sorkin
- CEO and co-founder, Jupiter
- 20 years commercializing new technologies
- Extensive experience with weather models, machine learning, sensor data and risk
- CEO, Zip2: Pioneering Internet GIS company, acquired by HP
- President, Kaggle: Pioneering machine learning company, acquired by Google
Matt Ocko
- Co-Founder and Managing Partner of DCVC (Data Collective)
- Three decades as entrepreneur, VC investor, and technologist in deep tech
- Respected angel investor (XenSource/CTRX, Krux/SFDC, Docker, AngelList, Uber, D-Wave, Zoom, Facebook/FB)
Nick Sturiale
- Founding Managing Partner, Ignition Partners
- 18 Years in Venture Capital, Top 1% Track Record
- Early investor in market defining companies such as Splunk, XenSource, Bill.com
- Formerly a Partner/Managing Director with Sevin Rosen Funds, Icon Ventures and The Carlyle Group
John Tough
Investing Partner at Energize Ventures
Board Member at DroneDeploy, Nozomi Networks, Volta Charging and Chicago Blend
Formerly Venture Capital Associate at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Green Growth fund
Formerly Chief Revenue Officer at Choose Energy, the largest online energy marketplace in North America
Andrew Klein
- Led Amsterdam office of Bain & Company
- Member of Bain’s Global Management Committee
- Head of Bain’s European Tech-Telecom practice
- Co-leader of Bain Global telecom strategy practice