Mr. Westrick founded 3TIER in 1999. Propelled by his vision and under his leadership, the company has grown from a small, boutique consultancy into a global leader in renewable energy information services. Prior to founding 3TIER, Mr. Westrick earned both Bachelor and Masters degrees in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Washington, with a focus on numerical weather prediction (NWP) modeling, remote sensing, and other weather forecasting technologies. He also served nearly 14 years in the US Army, including tours with the US Army Ranger Regiment and Special Operations Command. Mr. Westrick is a regular spokesperson on a wide-range of renewable energy topics. His perspectives and thoughts have been featured in The Wall Street Journal Online, CNN, The Financial Times, USAToday.com, Forbes.com, Time, The Washington Post, Seattle Times, and a wide-range of renewable energy trade media.
Mr. Hull leads 3TIER’s global sales, marketing, and business operations and has more than 20 years of management experience in the technology industry. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at F5 Networks, where he directed all aspects of the company’s global sales organization. During his tenure, Mr. Hull led sixteen quarters of sequential growth and quadrupled the company's quarterly revenue run rate. Mr. Hull joined F5 from PictureIQ, an Adobe Systems spinout, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer. At PictureIQ he launched the company’s flagship product, drove product sales, and helped secure the asset sale of the company to Ofoto/Kodak. Before that, Mr. Hull held several senior management positions at Visio (now part of Microsoft), including Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales. He was instrumental in Visio's growth from startup to a successful public company, playing a key role in its $1.5 billion merger with Microsoft in 2000. Mr. Hull holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.
Since joining 3TIER in 2005, Dr. Nijssen has played a number of technical and management roles, first as Director of Research and Development and Chief Technical Officer and since Fall 2008 as Senior Vice President, Technology. In this position, Dr. Nijssen leads 3TIER’s computing, software, data, and forecast teams. Prior to joining 3TIER, Dr. Nijssen was part of the faculty at the University of Arizona in Civil Engineering and Hydrology, where he published extensively in peer-reviewed scholarly journals on subjects including water resources, climate change, and hydrological modeling. In service to the professional community, Dr. Nijssen has chaired the Hydrology Committee of the American Meteorological Society since 2006. He received a Masters degree in Tropical Land and Water Management from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington.
As Senior Vice President, Product Development, Mr. Mahlum leads 3TIER’s product development process, from product conception through the research process and final engineering. Prior to joining 3TIER, he spent more than 16 years managing the development and operations of cutting-edge, high-tech businesses. Mr. Mahlum served as a General Manager for RealNetworks where his responsibilities included the development, launch, and on-going operations of the web-based portion of their Rhapsody Music service, RealGuide Video service, and their third party video subscription services. His experiences have also included serving as the Chief Operations Officer for a small technology start-up, and as a technology consultant with Andersen Consulting, where he provided services to Fortune 100 companies. He received his Bachelor degree in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Washington.
Dr. Storck leads 3TIER's Advanced Applications group, which takes on projects that fall outside the scope of the company’s core products and gives clients flexible access to 3TIER’s renewable energy expertise, data resources, and computational horsepower. His expertise in systems analysis, optimization, and hydrologic sciences played an integral role in the development and implementation of 3TIER’s unique range of wind, hydro, and solar products. Dr. Storck holds a Bachelor degree with distinction in Environmental Engineering from Cornell University, a Masters degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington, where he was also named a NASA Earth Systems Fellow.
As Vice President of Finance and Administration, Mr. Colich oversees the corporate financial management of the US and International business units. His other responsibilities include financial planning and analysis, financial modeling, and various sales operational reporting and analysis. In addition, Mr. Colich leads the human resources function and general business operations for 3TIER. Prior to joining 3TIER in 2007, Mr. Colich spent eight years working in the environmental services industry performing various roles, including operations management, financial management, business development, and project management. Mr. Colich holds an MBA from Seattle University and a BS in Biology from SUNY New Paltz.
Mr. Cheng leads the design, development, and maintenance of 3TIER's software systems through the use of sound engineering principles and state-of-the-art software architectures. Mr. Cheng specializes in the construction and utilization of large data sets, and the development of the highly-available and easily-usable software systems necessary to expose these data to the public. Prior to joining 3TIER in 2007, Mr. Cheng developed scalable and innovative e-commerce systems at Amazon, where he built and mined a large book text corpus in the Search Inside the Book project. He has also led a successful software development and project management consultancy for over a decade. Mr. Cheng holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.