argonne-national-laboratory
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Bob Abboud
Bob Abboud (Robert G. Abboud) is a nuclear engineer turned energy-storage executive who runs Beacon Power, the company that keeps spinning carbon-fiber flywheels to steady the U.S. power grid. Trained at Purdue and Northwestern, he cut his teeth researching at Argonne National Laboratory and engineering reactors at ComEd before founding RGA Labs, an Illinois engineering firm, and picking up patents in magnetics and superconducting technology. He also spent nearly a decade in local politics as village president of Barrington Hills and ran for U.S. Congress in Illinois's 16th district in 2008.
Matthew Shaxted
Matthew Shaxted is the founder and CEO of Parallel Works, a Chicago company that turns the headache of running heavy AI, machine learning, and simulation workloads across clouds and on-premises systems into a single control plane. A civil engineer who once wired 30 Linux desktops into a render farm to push building simulations, he met co-founder Michael Wilde at Argonne National Laboratory and spun the lab's parallel-workflow technology into a company in 2015. Bootstrapped and cash-flow positive, Parallel Works now powers hurricane risk models, cancer research, space-weather digital twins, and IL5-authorized defense workloads.
Lucas Roh
Lucas Roh is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded and runs MetalSoft, a Chicago-based startup whose software automates bare metal data centers - turning racks of multi-vendor switches, servers, and storage into cloud-like, on-demand infrastructure. A former Argonne National Laboratory researcher in automatic differentiation, he built the global web host Hostway (1998-2013), launched the big data cloud Bigstep, and spun MetalSoft out of Hostway's internal tooling in 2019. In December 2022 MetalSoft raised a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital.