Dr. Ron Dembo — Founder & CEO
Dr. Ron Dembo is the Founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, an organization dedicated to a mass reduction in global environmental impact. Zerofootprint provides software and services to individuals, governments, universities, and corporations that measures and manages carbon footprint and engages employees and citizens worldwide in combating climate change. Zerofootprint came in first place and won Gold in the Climate Change category at the Canadian Environment Awards in 2008.
Prior to founding Zerofootprint, Dr. Dembo was the Founder, CEO, and President of Algorithmics Incorporated, growing it from a start-up to the largest enterprise risk-management software company in the world, with offices in fifteen countries and over 70% of the world’s top 100 banks as clients. Algorithmics was consistently voted as one of the top 50 best-managed companies in Canada.
Dr. Dembo has also had a distinguished ten-year academic career at Yale University, where he was cross-appointed between the Department of Computer Science and the School of Management. Dr. Dembo has published over sixty technical papers on finance and mathematical optimization, and holds a number of patents in computational finance.
Dr. Dembo is the author of three books: Seeing Tomorrow: Rewriting the Rules of Risk, co-authored with Andrew Freedman, published in April 1998; Upside Downside: Simple Rules of Risk Management for the Smart Investor, co-authored with Daniel Stoffman, published in March 2006; and Everything You Wanted to Know About Offsetting But Were Afraid to Ask, co-authored with Clive Davidson, and released in May 2007.
In May 2007, Dr. Dembo was made a lifetime Fields Institute Fellow. This fellowship is awarded to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the Fields Institute, its programs, and to the Canadian mathematical community. In July 2007, Dr. Dembo was inducted as a charter member of the Risk Who’s Who. Dr. Dembo’s alma mater, the University of Waterloo, honoured Dr. Dembo with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. He is also a member of the University of Waterloo’s Deans Advisory Council in the Faculty of Environment, and a member of the Board of Advisors to the President at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Dr. Dembo is also the Chair of the Information Technology committee of the Board at Mount Sinai Hospital; Special Advisor to Board of Directors, Mt. Sinai Hospital; and is a member of the Board of Governors of University of Toronto’s NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) program.
Management Team
John Anzin — Chief Financial Officer
John joins Zerofootprint after holding senior financial roles at Efunds Corporation, a New York Stock Exchange listed firm, and Oasis Technology, a privately held software concern. He started his career at IBM Canada followed by Kraft Canada. John is a Certified Management Accountant (CMA), and holds an M.B.A. from the Schulich School of Business, and a B.Comm from Queen’s University.
Michael Glenn — Vice President, Chief Technology Officer
Michael has been a passionate user and developer of Internet applications for over 15 years. He holds a computer science degree from The University of Western Ontario and his career has spanned institutions in the areas of academia, private corporations, not-for profit organizations and start-ups. He co-founded the award winning web development firm Radiant Core Inc. and is proud to lead a very talented group of developers at Zerofootprint Software Inc.
Robert Ouellette - Vice President, Special Projects
Ouellette is an innovation thought-leader with global business experience at companies like Boeing Aircraft, Immersion Studios, Virtual Metropolis Inc. and MaRS Toronto. In 2003 he led the Innovation Benchmarking task force for Siemens International with partners Sony, Novartis, and Renault. His online campaign for Levi Strauss launched the careers of the Black Eyed Peas with a sound track composed by will.i.am and performed by the group. That project was one of the first commercial applications of social networking and serialized films on the Internet.
A recipient of the City of Toronto’s Urban Design Award for the John Street Media Corridor project, Ouellette is the past Director of the University of Toronto’s Information Technology Design Centre. The ITDC was the world’s first Alias|Wavefront Centre of Excellence and included on its Board of Advisors Dr. William B. Mitchell, the Director of M.I.T.’s Design Lab. Ouellette was an invited respondent at the United Nations in New York for their “Sustainability and Urban Design” Symposium. His writing on architecture, design, and politics was nominated for a National Newspaper Award by the National Post.
He was nominated for the University of Toronto’s Governor General’s Academic Award, received the gold medal for academic excellence in architecture, and also holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Business. He is a Fellow at OCAD’s Strategic Design Lab, and is the current Chair of the Sierra Club of Ontario.
Greg Ponesse — Vice President, Sales
Greg brings over 10 years of enterprise sales and management experience to his position at Zerofootprint. Previously, Greg served as Director of Sales and Business Development at Jatheon Technologies, an email management and compliance software company. Prior to joining Jatheon Technologies, Greg spent seven years with Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, where he served in various senior sales and marketing roles. Greg holds an MBA from Queens University, and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Dalhousie University.