Director’s Advisory Cabinet

Helping to build the prominence, impact and long-term sustainability of the KITP.

The Director’s Advisory Cabinet is a group of distinguished, invited members who actively help to elevate the reputation and influence of the KITP. Director’s Advisory Cabinet members assist the KITP Director with identifying strategic organizations and individuals with whom the KITP might partner, advocate for and promote the KITP in their networks, host special events that help to build support for the Institute, and lead by example through their own major philanthropic commitments in support of the KITP. The Advisory Cabinet also advises the KITP Director on a range of matters pertaining to the long-term sustainability of the KITP, in particular growing the KITP endowment.

Director's Advisory Cabinet Members:

Name Bio
David L. Brown

David L. Brown is a former NASA scientist and retired CEO of Telescan, Inc. He is currently a director and the chief market strategist at Sabrient Systems, LLC, an investment research firm.

A former CEO of two public companies, David has served on the boards of several banks and organizations, including the Advisory Board of the Southwest Council of Public CEOs. In 1985 he served as Chairman of the American Center for International Leadership for the U.S. Science and Technology Commission. He has written four books on investing and has taught finance and security analysis courses at the University of Houston.

He holds an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Houston and a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a member of the Author's Guild.

Carl Feinberg

Carl P. Feinberg is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Relational Architects Intl., a leading, enterprise software firm that operates internationally from its East Coast headquarters. Carl is a visionary philanthropist who is passionate about physics. He has generously established endowed chairs at both the KITP and the Institute for Advanced Study. Feinberg graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and studied software engineering at New York University. Carl was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Fred Gluck

Fred Gluck is Chairman and CEO of CytomX a newly founded venture to exploit micro fluidics in cell sorting and related areas. He is a former managing director of McKinsey & Company, Inc., the international management consulting firm. He served with McKinsey from 1967 to 1995 and led the firm as its Managing Director from 1988 to 1994, when he retired from the Firm to join The Bechtel Group, where he served as Vice-Chairman and Director. Mr. Gluck retired from Bechtel in July 1998. He rejoined McKinsey and Company as a consultant to the firm in 1998 and continued in that role until July 2003.

Mr. Gluck earned a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Manhattan College and a masters degree in the same field from New York University. In addition, he did graduate studies in operations research at Columbia University. He holds an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University.

Mr. Gluck serves on the board of directors of AMGEN (Thousand Oaks, CA) [NASDAQ].

Mr. Gluck also serves as Director of a number of eleemosynary organizations, including the Cottage Health System (Santa Barbara, Ca) and The New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was Vice-Chairman of New York Hospital, prior to its merger with Columbia Presbyterian and is currently Vice-Chairman of the Cottage Health System. He is also active at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a trustee of the UCSB Foundation, a member of the Advisory Council of the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, and a member of the Steering Committee for the Campaign for UCSB. Additionally, Mr. Gluck serves on the Board of Advisors of RAND Health in Santa Monica, CA. and Tennenbaum Capital Partners in Los Angeles, California and the Brookings Budgeting for National Priorities Corporate Advisory Committee.

Gus Gurley

Gus Gurley has a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a M.S., Physics, Scientific Instrumentation, University of California at Santa Barbara.

In 1987 Gus Gurley co-founded the local high-tech company, Digital Instruments (DI), along with Virgil Elings, former UCSB Physics Professor. DI pioneered scanning probe microscopy with a simple goal - to make the power of scanning probe microscopy readily available to scientists and engineers, enabling them to image and explore nanoscale features and structures never seen before. That same year, they
constructed the first commercially successful scanning tunneling microscope, shipping the first Nanoscope units. Gus designed the NanoScope and led the NanoScope software development. He managed new product development at DI, and is one of the world's leading authorities on scanning probe control systems. Prior to DI, Gus designed flight simulators for Link flight Simulation.

DI received several awards for business and engineering excellence, including 3 Photonics Circle of Excellence awards; local, state and national new product awards from the Society of Professional engineers. In 1998, Digital Instruments officially merged with Veeco Instruments, a leading supplier of instrumentation for the research, semiconductor, data storage, telecommunications and other industries. By combining the technological strengths of each company, the newly formed company added the distinction of being the world leader in 3-D surface metrology.

Since retiring from Digital Instruments/Veeco, Gus has been exploring his interest in systems level neuroscience and neural networking. He hopes to develop a neural simulator and has been working on the software that would support this digital based device.

Douglas D. Troxel

Douglas Donald Troxel was raised on a farm near Lake City, Iowa. Kindergarten through third grade, were at a one-room country school with one other in the class. He attended Iowa State University with a major in mathematics and minor in physics. In 1966, as a senior, he crossed over to the college of Engineering to take a Fortran course and immediately chose programming (called Data Processing then) as a career.

His first job was Programmer/Analyst at Consumer's Power Company in Jackson, Michigan where he learned COBOL, Assembler and the newly emerging IBM product called C.I.C.S. In 1973, he went to Detroit Edison as a contract programmer. In 1975, he packed up his family and moved to San Francisco. If it didn't fit in the Ryder truck, it was left on the lawn.

After various contract programming stints, he formed SERENA Consulting in 1980 for a gig at Bank of America where he continued writing a product called COMPAREX for the mainframe world. It quickly became an industry standard and financed the company growth without using venture capital. Then, returning to B of A, he began building Change Man with other like-minded software developers whom he hired.

In 1997, after being CEO, Chairman and primary developer, he hired a new management team to drive the business, now renamed SERENA Software. He took the company public on the Nasdaq in 1999 as SRNA. The congressional reaction to Enron, among others, called the Sarbanes-Oxley laws proved onerous to abide for a small company and he looked to go private. SERENA had thousands of mainframe customers and over 100K (seat) licenses for Windows and Unix products. 98 of the Fortune 100 rely on SERENA's products and services. It was and still is the leader in the I.T. Change Governance niche competing against IBM, Computer Associates and Compuware.

In 2001, he retired to Kona Hawaii. In 2006, Silver Lake Partners assisted in taking SERENA private leaving about 20% of the company stock for Mr. Troxel. He now serves as a director to the Board and consults with the developers for product strategy.

In 2008, he married his Kona neighbor Deborah and they bought a house in Montecito where Deb grew up. They now split their time between Kona, Santa Barbara and SFO for SERENA functions. He is also President of the family foundation Change Happens and enjoys pursuing life long interests in physics, astronomy and politics.