Sub-Project Lead

Raúl Álvarez is a data center expert and sustainability advocate. He has extensive experience in data center operations and design, especially in high-performance computing and edge computing. He is passionate about bridging the gap between technical and business aspects, and helping the European region achieve its sustainability goals through innovative data center solutions. He is also an active member of the Open Compute community, where he leads a workstream on immersion cooling challenges. He is well aware of the challenges and opportunities of adopting open technologies in the European market, and strives to foster collaboration and innovation to overcome them. He believes in the power of community and technology to make a positive impact on the world. Because of that, he was recently appointed to lead the Open Compute Project EMEA Regional Community.

Brian Aspnes is responsible for platform hardware pathfinding and architecture in the Data Platforms Engineering & Architecture (DPEA) with over 27 years of experience at Intel. Brian's focus includes high performance next generation Xeon processor architecture and translating new IO technologies into compelling datacenter platforms across High Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud and Enterprise. Brian has led the architecture and design of multiple 2-8 socket server generations for Intel's Datacenter group, including 11 years in Intel's Network Product Group. Brian Aspnes is an Open Compute Sub-Project Lead for the Datacenter Modular Hardware (DC-MHS) Project, a Workstream Lead and co-author for the DC-MHS Full Width HPM Form Factor (M-FLW) Base Specification, and contributor on the six DC-MHS specifications.

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Jeroen Burks is a big advocate of 7R strategy to make IT more sustainable. Next to a background in Applied Physics and Business administration, Jeroen operated a startup aiming to build liquid cooled, decentralized, edge datacenter that recycle the waste heat a greenhouses. This gave an unique insight in the ecosystem of datacenters, liquid cooling and edge, all the way from design and manufacturing to operating and Business development.

Jeroen personal mantra:  “It’s no use if it’s not used” goes 2 ways. First: It doesn’t make sense to put effort in a project if no one will use the solution, and secondly promoting the re-use of things. Could be hardware, could be heat.

Currently Jeroen is a consultant at ThermoIT; helping datacenters and IT operators change to liquid cooling and heat reuse, as well as bringing InCoolings’ 2 phase chip cooling to the market.

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Priya Chhiba is a Senior Technical Program Manager in the Office of Strategy and Incubation (OSI) in Google's Advanced Technology and Innovation team. Priya has worked at Google for seven months , and has a passion for Sustainability. In her current role she is responsible for the incubation of new datacenter technologies that are sustainability focused and support Google's Net Zero by 2030 target. Her current responsibilities include the incubation of solutions associated with the reduction of Scope 1 and 3 Emissions, Water/Cooling Sustainability and Energy Efficiency.

Before joining Google, Priya had two decades of experience in power generation and started her career working as a power plant engineer at a Coal Power Plant in South Africa. Her most recent position was engineering manager at Enercon Services Inc. where she led multidisciplinary engineering teams to develop design, regulatory, analysis and licensing solutions for operating nuclear power plants. She also led ENERCON's Hydrogen Initiative, which was an ENERCON incubator venture focused on establishing the company as a service provider to the hydrogen economy.

Priya has a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa and a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering focused on Robotics and Controls from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also has an MBA in specializing in Global Business Management from Ashford University. Priya holds Professional Engineering Licenses in several US states, is a member of the ASME (participant in the ASME Energy Storage Committee), SWE, and CATF Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative. Priya was also a speaker at the Sustainable Energy Council's inaugural Hydrogen America's Summit in 2021.

Damien is Hardware TLM in Compute Server Design team of Meta. He is responsible for defining and designing Meta next-generation server system to support fast growing infrastructure demands in large scale. Prior to Meta, Damien was with Intel responsible for Client segment power delivery architecture and customer reference board designs.

Damien led the OCP NIC sub-project with passionate and talented members consist of NIC suppliers, Hyper-scaler, Enterprise, connector suppliers and 3rd party test vendor to develop NIC form factor and specification development for NIC and non-NIC use-cases. OCP NIC has been a successful standard form factor in the industry.

Damien also led Meta’s contribution in DC-MHS jointly define server form factors with other industry players.

Jaime Comella is a passionate advocate of developing data centers with a holistic view. He works at AQ Compute as Lead Data Center Architect, focusing on developing highly sustainable data centers, with a net zero architecture. Jaime has worked in the past years to enable decentralized computing liquid-cooled infrastructures that turn heat into something usable, acting in design and project management as well as at the international business development. He co-leads the Heat Reuse subproject of the OCP and is a member of the data center committee of the ASHRAE Spain Chapter. He lives in Madrid with his wife and two cats.

Ann-Kathrin Dechert is a Bachelor Professional (CCI) and studied foreign languages (english and french) before, she is now responsible for Solution Sales for the Rittal IT Cooling portfolio with almost twelve years experience within Rittal and already five years before, also in the cooling field of air conditioning and ventilation. She is mainly focussed on new IT cooling technologies, such as Direct-Liquid-Cooling solutions, which does of course also include rear door heat exchangers.

Ann-Kathrin is an open-minded, highly interested and very structured force in the company and uses her positiv attitude to encourage others to join her.

In her free time, Ann-Kathrin loves to read books, enjoys cooking at home and in summer time ride her bike.

Michael DeMerchant has been in the optical communications field for 25 years, working in a variety of engineering and leadership roles. He has a broad background in manufacturing, design and development of optical devices and subsystems, primarily for Telecom applications.

Michael is currently Sr. Director of Product Line Management for Optical Circuit Switches at Lumentum. Prior to his current role, he served as head of product development for Lumentum's Transport Line Subsystems products.

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Shijian (Nill) Ge is a Firmware Architect at Bytedance. He has defined Bytedance Cloud Firmware (coreboot+LinuxBoot) roadmap and is leading the team to make it into reality. He always has deep collaboration with the community and achieve win-win.

Nill has been working on system firmware for the last 20 years. He has worked on codebase module, silicon module, platform module on Tiano EDK2, he joined UEFI specification defination in 2007(Network sub-team). Prior to Bytedance, Nill worked on 4-socket, 8-socket server platform design. He had strong experience in server memory and RAS sub-systems.

Nill is a frequent speaker on firmware and system design topics at industry conferences. He enjoys collaboration with the community, he has hosted the workshop and delivered training on memory, RAS and system design.

Jabari is a seasoned Mechanical Engineer, bringing over a decade of diverse experience in the Oil & Gas and critical facilities domains. His journey as a consulting engineer has seen him supporting multiple large capital expenditure projects, ranging from chemical processing plants to IT infrastructure. Since joining the OCP in 2018, Jabari has actively contributed to several workgroups, including Door Heat Exchanger, Advanced Cooling Facilities, and Data Center Facilities, demonstrating his commitment to driving cooperation and innovation in the datacenter industry. Additionally, as a member of the SSI Alliance - a Linux Foundation Project, he helps foster industry-wide collaboration to address complex challenges. Jabari's expertise has recently led him to the Uptime Institute, where he serves as a Senior Research Analyst, continuing his journey in shaping the future of datacenter sustainability, performance and resilience.

Jessica is a Thermal Tech Lead Engineer at Intel in the Data Platforms Engineering and Architecture Group. Currently, her focus is on developing advanced cooling solutions for IT equipment using liquid cooling. Jessica joined Intel 2006 and has managed projects relating to the development of new and innovative technology solutions for IT equipment in fluids, acoustics, and thermals. She joined Intel from academia, where she worked as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering. She taught a variety of fluid mechanic and thermal curriculum. She has 20+ years of experience in modeling, experiments, and project management. Jessica co-chaired the Grace Hopper Poster sessions by invitation from the Anita Borg Institute, and she is a recipient of the 2013 SWE Emerging Leader Award. Jessica has 10 patents and 25+ peer reviewed publications in journals and conferences. In OCP, Jessica has previously led the Advanced Cooling Solutions Cold Plate Sub-Project, which delivered OCPs first cold plate requirements document. 

LinkedIn

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Jordan is a Thermal/Mechanical Engineer on the Datacenter Thermal-Mechanical Solutions team at Intel, specifically working in Intel's mechanical and liquid-cooling testing lab. He began his involvement with OCP in 2018 as the lead test engineer for hand-mate Universal Quick Disconnect (UQD) inter-supplier testing. Since then, he has contributed to multiple OCP specifications and whitepapers with the goal of aiding the datacenter industry transition to cold-plate liquid-cooling.

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Iwan Kartawira has worked in the Optical Telecom industry for over 25 Years as a Hardware Engineer, System Network Architect,  Principal Systems Engineer, and Sr. Product Line Manager.

From 2018 to 2024, he worked in Equinix as a Principal Network Architect to help architect, design, implement, and deploy the Automated Fiber Cross Connect inside Equinix's Data Center using the OCS solution.

In 2025, he joined iPronics as a Network Specialist and Product Integration Manager, responsible for working closely with customers and the R&D team to ensure the product’s successful deployment to the market.

SMRC (Samsung Memory Research Center) and OCP Experience Center of Samsung Product Planning team.

Mike is not only responsible for leading the internal OCP control tower, but he is also taking charge of official Samsung OCP channel.

Bio

Jawad Nasrullah is CEO of Palo Alto Electron, a company at the forefront of developing heterogeneous integrated circuits and advancing 3D-IC technology for high-performance computing. His previous roles include President, CTO, and Co-Founder at zGlue, a pioneering company that developed a platform for chiplet production and a marketplace for their distribution. Before his entrepreneurial venture with zGlue, Jawad honed his engineering skills at leading tech companies including Samsung Electronics, Intel, and Sun Microsystems. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, is the author of six published works, and has been awarded 14 patents.

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Wai Chung Ngai is the Director of APJ Field Application Engineering at AMD, where he leads a team dedicated to providing technical support for AMD's commercial products in the Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region. His main tasks include being the primary technical contact for commercial clients, engaging with large APJ customers to showcase the value of AMD technology, and spearheading initiatives to strengthen AMD's presence in the commercial computing sector.

Prior to joining AMD, Wai Chung served as the Director of Cloud Service Providers & Hyperscale for APJ, leading a team focused on acquiring and managing CSP customers and collaborate with the Lenovo Global CSP team to drive and expand the Infrastructure Solutions portfolio.

Before his tenure at Lenovo, Wai Chung held key roles at Dell, including Director of Dell’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure in Singapore and Director of Data Center Solutions (DCS) in Hong Kong for over a decade. He was the founding member of DCS to start-up the business operation and was responsible for providing Custom Server Design Platforms, Data Center Solutions & Services to Hyperscale and Large Enterprise customers in Greater China and APJ.

With nearly three decades of experience in the IT industry, Wai Chung brings deep expertise in the Hyperscale market and data center technology solutions. He has also contributed to the IT community as the APEC Project Lead of Open Compute Project (OCP), facilitating collaboration, driving Open Standard and Hyperscale Innovation at regional level. 

Wai Chung holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Strathclyde.

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Lee Prewitt is a Director of Cloud Hardware Storage with 30 years of storage industry experience ranging from Magneto-Optical to spinning rust to Flash.  His former work at Microsoft has included working in the Windows and Devices Group where he was responsible for many of the components in the storage stack including File Systems, Spaces, Storport and Microsoft’s inbox miniport drivers.  His responsibilities included storage devices ranging from SD and UFS in mobile to NVMe in Enterprise and Data Centers.  He currently works in the Azure Hardware group where his team is responsible for future Data Center storage initiatives, specifications, and evangelization.

Alex is the Sustainability Lead for the Cloud & Service Provider segment at Schneider Electric. Prior to Schneider, Alex was on the team that established the North American microgrid business at Hitachi, and worked as an environmental and energy consultant for the National Park Service. He is the author of the book "Energy Resilient Buildings and Communities," from CRC Press, and the upcoming "Powering Through: A Professional Guide for Energy Resilience," which in partially dedicated to data center resilience strategies. He earned a B.A. in Environmental Science from Cornell University, and an M.S. from Johns Hopkins University in Economics.

Bio

Anu Ramamurthy has worked in the semiconductor industry for over 25 years. She is currently an Associate Fellow, Design at Microchip Technology. Her current interests lie in the area of advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration. This includes all aspects of the ecosystem, starting with the technology, packaging, architecture, test, system integration and cost modelling of such designs. She is very active with the OCP - Open Domain Specific Architecture subgroup.

Anu is also very interested in mentoring women in engineering, has been part of the TechWomen program run by the U.S State department and also actively involved in the mentoring programs at Microchip.

Daniel Robbins, the esteemed Executive Director of MDC's (Modular Data Centers) at RakworX, Inc. , is a seasoned leader with over two decades of progressive experience in IT Infrastructure.   He has a wealth of experience in shaping the landscape of modular data center solutions. With a proven track record in the industry, Robbins brings a strategic vision and innovative mindset to his role. In his capacity as Executive Director, Robbins plays a pivotal role in steering the direction of MDC's product design, development, application, and implementation. His leadership is characterized by a deep understanding of the evolving needs of the data center industry and a commitment to delivering cutting-edge modular solutions.

Scott Sharp is a Staff Mechanical Engineer and global program engineering lead for third party data centers at Google. Scott is also the co-project lead for the OCP Ready work stream within OCP. During his tenure at Google, he has supported internal infrastructure as well as third party data centers.

Before joining Google, he worked as a consulting mechanical engineer supporting a number of different clients and industries (pharmaceutical, commercial, mission critical, heavy industrial, etc.).

Scott holds a bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering, and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL). He also holds a professional engineering license in a handful of states.

Ross Stenfort is a Hardware System Engineer at Sandisk delivering scalable storage solutions.  He has been involved in development of storage systems, SSDs, ROCs, HBAs and HDDs with many successful products and over 40 patents.  He has storage experience in both large and small companies including CNEX, Seagate, LSI, SandForce, SiliconStor and Adaptec.  He has a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Bio

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Han is currently with Meta AI/HPC core system engineering team. He has been in server, storage, cloud infrastructure, social network industry over 20 years with full experience and solid cross-field expertise.

He worked for HPE, DELL, HGST （Formerly as IBM Storage Group) etc. before joining Meta.

Han got a Ph.D. degree majoring in ECE. His academic backgrounds are in multi-areas: Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Compute Science, Math, Data and Graphics Science, Machine Learning and Forecast, security and Cryptography.

He has a Patent Portfolio of around 30 patents and numerous conference, journal, and book publication as well as years of experience as Journal and Conference reviewer.

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Chief Architect of IEI (Inspur Electronic Information), the first author of book "Ten Technologies of Metaverse" and book "Software Defined Storage".