— Deborah (Deb) Gracio is taking over next month as director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
Gracio has been with the U.S. Department of Energy lab for 35 years, currently in the role of associate laboratory director for national security. Her research includes the study of computational capabilities and developing methodologies, algorithms and technologies to address scientific challenges with big data.
PNNL, which is based in Richland, Wash., and has additional offices across the region, conducts research in clean energy, the power grid, environmental cleanup and other cutting-edge fields. Gracio succeeds Steven Ashby, who led PNNL for a decade and was with DOE for more than four decades.
— Four months after joining Redmond, Wash.-based automotive tech company MicroVision, Glen De Vos has been promoted from chief technologist to president and CEO. The move takes effect Sept. 30. De Vos succeeds Sumit Sharma, who has been with MicroVision for more than a decade and led the company for five of those years.
Prior to joining MicroVision, which has operations in Redmond, Detroit and Hamburg, Germany, De Vos was at automotive components company Delphi for 25 years. That business later became Aptiv, and DeVos held leadership roles at both companies.
MicroVision builds automotive lidar sensors for automotive safety systems, autonomous vehicles and non-automotive applications. The board of directors has not named a new CTO.
— Rajeev Singh has joined the board of directors for Basalt Health, a Nashville-based startup developing technology that provides healthcare providers with easier access to patient data.
“This is exactly the kind of problem AI was meant to solve. It’s not about replacing the human touch in healthcare — it’s about amplifying it, creating the infrastructure that will scale quality care across our entire healthcare system,” Singh said on LinkedIn.
Singh is a longtime Seattle-area leader who was CEO of Accolade for nine years and president of Concur Technologies for two decades. He worked with Ben Hackett, Basalt Health’s founder, while both were at Accolade. Singh disclosed that he is an investor in the startup.
— Zones, an Auburn-based IT company, named Yehia Maaty Omar as its new CEO. Omar has served on the company’s board for three years. He was with Xerox for more than 25 years and has held leadership roles with Megalos Consulting and the IT company Curvature.
Firoz Lalji stepped down as Zones’ leader after 27 years with the company, and most of those as CEO. Lalji will remain with Zones as chair of its board of directors and will continue to be involved with its “long-term vision and strategic direction,” according to a release.
— Seattle techies Dunni Abiodun and Eric Neuman have launched Dotted, a startup building a platform to boost the efficiency of product managers.
Neuman was most recently a principal product manager at law enforcement tech company Axon, and has worked as a PM for Amazon and Microsoft. Abiodun took the entrepreneurial leap after nearly a decade at Microsoft as a software engineer.
“PMs are the force multipliers for every product team,” Neuman said on LinkedIn. “When their time is wasted, the whole team slows down. When you give them time back, you unlock speed, creativity, and results for everyone. That’s not just good for companies — that’s good for progress, period.”
— Roger Nyhus, a longtime communications leaders in the Pacific Northwest, is founder and CEO of newly launched international consultancy AMBO Strategy.
Seattle-based AMBO aims to serve CEOs and leaders in delivering “candid counsel, discreet support and independent perspective to help leaders cut through chaos, sharpen strategy and simplify high-stakes decision-making,” according to LinkedIn.
Prior to AMBO, Nyhus was U.S. ambassador to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean for a year during the Biden administration. He was founder and CEO of Nyhus Communications for nearly three decades.
— Sana Biotechnology, a Seattle-based cell and gene therapy company, shared via an SEC filing that Aaron Grossman is joining the company as executive vice president and chief legal officer on Oct. 20.
Bernard Cassidy is retiring from his role as executive VP and general counsel after three years. Cassidy provided legal counsel for Juno Therapeutics earlier in his career.
— Margaret Dawson is now chief marketing officer of the German software company SUSE. Dawson has held PR leadership roles at Seattle-area companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Apptio and others. She was most recently CMO of Chronosphere.
— Law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner named Erin Ehlert as the office managing partner of its Seattle office. Ehlert was a prosecutor in King County, Wash., for more than 20 years. Her subsequent private practice focused on medical malpractice, product liability and tort law.
