— Nicole Ford joined Nordstrom as chief information security officer. Ford previously served as vice president and CISO at Rockwell Automation, with past experience leading security transformation initiatives and developing cybersecurity programs.
A two-time recipient of the Top 100 CISO Award who garnered a CSO50 recognition, Ford will oversee Nordstrom’s security team and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) team.
Ford is also an active member of various cybersecurity and technology advisory boards, such as the Cybersecurity Collective and Evanta CISO Governing Body.
Ford will relocate to Seattle for the new role with Nordstrom.
— The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) hired Ross Girshick, a former research scientist at Meta. Girshick will be working on the PRIOR (Perception Reasoning and Interaction Research) team at AI2.
“Ross is one of the most influential and impactful researchers in AI,” Aniruddha Kembhavi, senior director of computer vision at AI2, wrote on LinkedIn. “If you work on developing or harnessing the power of computer vision, you have most likely used a model or a method developed by Ross and his awesome co-authors.”
— Heather DeJong, a longtime Seattle-based Amazon leader and former director at Target, joined San Francisco e-commerce startup CommerceIQ as senior vice president of people and culture.
— Omnidian, a Seattle company that manages solar power performance and services commercial and residential solar installations, hired Minesh Shah as president.
Shah’s past roles include leadership positions at Tesla, Walmart.com, Stitch Fix and UNIQLO. He also sat on the board of Bed Bath & Beyond.
Shah will report to CEO Mark Liffmann, who co-founded the company in 2016.
— Seattle-area startup Spectrum Effect raised $3 million from Boulder Ventures and added Kishen Mangat, general partner at Boulder, to its board of directors. Kishen previously was an executive at Cisco and co-founded BroadHop.
Founded in 2015, Kirkland, Wash.-based startup Spectrum Effect sells artificial intelligence-based network interference mitigation software for mobile networks. It raised $1.9 million in August.
— Vancouver, Wash.-based biotech company Absci announced that longtime AstraZeneca exec Sir Menelas Pangalos will join its board, effective Jan. 1. Absci announced a deal with AstraZeneca this week worth up to $247 million.
— Impel Pharmaceuticals CFO Michael Kalb is stepping down at the end of this year. Adrian Adams, Impel’s former CEO, resigned last month. The Seattle biotech company went public in 2021.
— Seattle-based commercial real estate firm JLL hired Matt Betterman as senior vice president. Betterman previously worked for Newmark and Colliers International.
— Seattle climate startup Muir AI hired former Meta engineer Ethan Cassel-Mace as senior software engineer and former Microsoft data scientist Erika Odmark as senior data scientist.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that Minesh Shah will report to Mark Liffmann at Omnidian.
