Meet
Our Team

CTO, Co-Founder

Mitch is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Luminous Computing. He knew, very early on, what he wanted to do: to make machine intelligence a reality. He began as a researcher at Princeton, where he was pioneer in establishing a mathematical relationship between a laser and a biological spiking neuron. This helped create a field now known as Neuromorphic Photonics. His focus soon switched to building systems of neurons, where he discovered that the real bottleneck was communicating data across the dense networks that connected neurons together. As he saw neural networks becoming commercially useful at a large scale, Mitch realized that the best way to create the most powerful AI supercomputer was to build a company to do it.

He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph. D. at Princeton, where he was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. While at Princeton, he was a contributing author to the textbook on Neuromorphic Photonics, and is an author on more than 70 papers and patents. His work has been cited over 2,700 times. He led the Afrobeat band, Sensemaya, and was a member for over 10 years. Mitch has played piano professionally as a jazz musician for most of his life, despite never having learned to properly read music.

President
Dominick Scordo is the President of Luminous Computing where he brings his decades of experience in R&D and product development to lead this talented team. Scordo spent 21 years at Bell Labs working in Research and Development including leading the R&D efforts there. From Bell Labs, Scordo joined Alcatel-Lucent for almost 12 years servings as VP for WDM and finally for Product Lifecycle Management. He is no stranger to the start-up world having spent 5 years as SVP of Engineering at Elenion Technologies, staying on as a leader at Nokia after Nokia’s aquisition of Elenion.

Chief Architect

David Baker grew up on a ranch in New Mexico. He received his BSEE from New Mexico State University and his MSE and PHD in ECE from the University of Texas, Austin. His area of research interest was computer vision and image processing. He began his career on a super-computer design at Texas Instruments, competing with Cray. While there, he worked on the design of the TI TMS9900 and TMS99000 MCU chips. He joined IBM and worked on various internal processors as well as the ISA development for ROMP(801), PowerPC, and RS6000. While working for IBM Research he was part of the original AIX hypervisor implementation team and later the GL to OpenGL ports to RS6000. Subsequently he has spent 25 years doing startups including two IPOs and two acquisitions, at places like SigmaTel, NVidia, Brooktree, and Legerity. Along the way, he was VP of engineering for 3 different VLIW DSP companies and worked on micro- architectures and ISAs for almost all of his career to date.

Vice President, System-on-Chip Design

Bryan Cope is the director of SOC Design at Luminous Computing, and brings with him over 25 years of industry experience as a leader of design and technology teams developing innovative silicon devices in startup and venture funded environments. Bryan has successfully managed multi-site and diverse teams, owning the entire design process from customer engagement/product definition/architecture through silicon validation and firmware development. Prior to joining Luminous, Bryan served as VP of SOC Architecture & Realization at Eta Compute, where he assembled and led a team of digital and analog design and verification engineers building world-class low-power MCUs targeting AI/ML-at-the-edge applications. Bryan’s experiences also include positions at Cirrus Logic, Ambiq Micro, Nvidia and numerous startups.

Director, CPU Design

Tauseef is the Director of CPU Design at Luminous Computing. He brings more than 15 years of experience in designing high performance CPUs and DSPs. At Western Digital, he was a pioneering member of the team that designed and open sourced the first industrial grade RISC-V CPU. Prior to that, he was a micro-architect at Qualcomm and the processors he built were shipped in 3 billion devices. He holds 3 patents in various sub-specialties of CPU design. His PhD research was focused on improving yield in 3-D circuits. He also holds an MS and BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. When he is not shaping transistors, you will find him evangelizing entrepreneurship and brainstorming about a wide array of topics from social apps to sports and food.

Director, People & Places

Whitney leads the People & Places functions, partnering across the team to design and scale impactful people-first programs, ensuring Luminous employees are supported and empowered to do their best work.

Over the last 10 years, Whitney has focused on aligning mission to people strategy around employee engagement, total rewards, learning and development, and workplace experience.

Prior to joining Luminous, Whitney held roles at Bruker Nano Surfaces and Elenion Technologies. Whitney holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MBA with a concentration in Human Resources from Brandman University.

In her free time, Whitney can be found rescuing animals, cruising her ’70 Ford Bronco, and chasing her toddler around