Trent McConaghy

Trent McConaghy is a Co-Founder of BigchainDB and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. He also is a Co-Founder of Ocean Protocol and serves as its Board Member. He co-founded Solido Design Automation and served as its Co-Chief Technology Officer. He was a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Analog Design Automation Inc., which was acquired by Synopsys in 2004. Prior to that, he did research for the Canadian Department of National Defense. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2008. He received a Bachelor's in Engineering (with great distinction), and a Bachelor's in Computer Science (with great distinction), both from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1999. He has about 40 peer-reviewed technical papers and patents granted / pending. He has given invited talks / tutorials at many labs, universities, and conferences such as JPL, MIT, ICCAD, and DAC. He is regularly a technical program committee member and reviewer in both the CAD and computational intelligence fields, such as IEEE Trans CAD, ACM TODAES, Electronics Letters, to the IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, GPTP, GECCO, ICES, etc. His research interests include statistical machine learning, computational intelligence, evolutionary computation, and nonlinear programming; with transistor-level CAD applications of variation-aware design, high-dimensional circuit modeling, analog topology design, automated sizing, knowledge extraction, and symbolic modeling. In 2001, he was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Young Alumni Award by the University of Saskatchewan for significant accomplishments since graduation.