Management Team

The Accelrys management team includes:

Max Carnecchia
President & Chief Executive Officer

Max Carnecchia is President and CEO of Accelrys and also serves on the board of directors. Mr. Carnecchia brings more than two decades of high technology experience to his position. Most recently, he served as President of Interwoven, a global leader in content management solutions. At Interwoven, he ran the day to day operations of the business and led the company through 21 consecutive quarters of year over year revenue growth and operating margin expansion. Interwoven was acquired by Autonomy Corporation, PLC, in a transaction valued at approximately $800 million in Q1 2009. Mr. Carnecchia joined Interwoven in 2001 as Vice President of Alliances, and was then promoted to Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, overseeing the company’s global field organization prior to being promoted to President. Before Interwoven, he was Vice President of Global Sales for Xoriant, Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for Smart DB Corporation sales, and has also held management positions at Intel and Group 1 Software. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from The Stevens Institute of Technology.

Michael A. Piraino
Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Michael A. Piraino is Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer of Accelrys. Prior to joining Accelrys, he served as Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer of M2 Technology Partners, LLC, a private investment company focused on domestic and international acquisitions of software and services businesses. Before M2, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Epicor Software Corporation, a leading global provider of enterprise business software solutions for midmarket-sized companies. He was instrumental in Epicor’s merger, acquisition, and capital markets activities and led the negotiations, acquisition, and integration of ten companies during his tenure. Piraino received his B.S. in Accounting from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. and is also a Certified Public Accountant.

Dr. Matt Hahn
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

As Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Matt Hahn, Ph.D., oversees product development at Accelrys, including the implementation of the scientific informatics platform underpinning the company's broad software solutions. He has been designing and creating software solutions for the research community for over 25 years. He co-founded SciTegic in 1999, and as CEO, led the company through significant growth to become the market leader in scientific workflow solutions, serving most of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. In 2004, SciTegic was acquired by Accelrys, where subsequently Dr. Hahn served first as General Manager of the company’s SciTegic division and later as Chief Science and Technology Officer. Prior to founding SciTegic, Dr. Hahn was Director of Development at Molecular Simulations Inc., where for ten years he oversaw the development and market introduction of a wide range of successful chemistry and informatics software products. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Santa Cruz, under Professor W.T. Wipke, co-founder of MDL.

Judith Ohrn Hicks
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

Judith Ohrn Hicks and her team are responsible for the recruiting, retention, training, and development of Accelrys’ worldwide staff. She has more than 20 years of experience in the field of human resource management and has spent a significant amount of her career staffing and developing organizations for emerging high technology companies. Prior to joining Accelrys, Mrs. Hicks was Vice President, Human Resources at Pharmacopeia, a biotechnology company (acquired by Ligand Pharmaceuticals in 2008.) She began her career in the specialty retail division at General Mills and has also held management positions with Ward Management Group, a prominent human resource consulting firm, and Software Developers Corporation, a publicly-traded software company. She holds a B.S. in Finance and Marketing from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Mollie Hunter
Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Services

In a career spanning over twenty-five years, Mollie Hunter has built a long and impressive track record of success in high technology and enterprise software sales, marketing and professional services, developing operational strategies and directing resources from initial business need through execution with proven results . Prior to joining Accelrys, Mrs. Hunter served as VP of Product Marketing and then divisional Senior Vice President of Epicor Software Corporation where her responsibilities included Sales, Marketing, Development, Technical Support and Professional Services supporting enterprise application software solutions and services. At Epicor, Mrs. Hunter was responsible for the acquisition of ROI Systems which included a channel organization involving direct and indirect sales strategies. Mrs. Hunter has also led national sales teams for companies including EDS, ADP, Basic Four, Baan and Dataworks and has consulted with two start-up SaaS organizations: Medliance and New Momentum. Before accepting her current position, Mrs. Hunter headed Accelrys’ combined Pre-sales and Professional Services organizations.

Leif Pedersen
Senior Vice President of Marketing, Product Management and Corporate Development

Leif Pedersen is a seasoned software industry executive with more than 25 years of product and marketing experience supporting multiple vertical markets and a proven track record of building high-performance teams in the areas of marketing, product management and corporate development. Before joining Accelrys, Mr. Pedersen served as vice president of Siemens with global responsibility for driving company growth within the automotive, pharmaceutical, aerospace, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, chemicals and other industries. As vice president at UGS prior to its acquisition by Siemens, Mr. Pedersen was responsible for managing business strategies within eight industry verticals and was part of a team that successfully grew UGS into a leading global product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions company. Prior to UGS, Mr. Pedersen held executive leadership positions with Vignette Corp., Novell Inc., Computer Associates and Oracle Corporation.

Anil Thakur
Senior Vice President, Product Development

As Senior Vice President, Product Development, Anil Thakur is responsible for defining and directing Accelrys’ software development strategy to maintain and enhance the company’s position as a leading scientific enterprise software and services organization. Mr. Thakur brings over twenty years of software development experience to overseeing the development and quality assurance of new software products and enhancements to existing products using both on- and offshore resources. Mr. Thakur demonstrated success in directing and developing a high-impact software development organization upon joining Symyx as SVP Product Development in 2008. He subsequently exhibited strong leadership in successfully integrating the software development organizations of Symyx and Accelrys when the companies merged in 2010. Prior to joining Accelrys, Mr. Thakur was employed for 12 years at Oracle Corporation, serving there as VP of Server Technology Development, VP of Service Engineering and Senior Director of Oracle Outsourcing. In this last role, Mr. Thakur led the core team of Oracle engineers responsible for rolling out “Oracle On Demand” Cloud-based services. Mr. Thakur has also built and led technical product support groups at Auspex Systems, Inc. and VeriFone, Inc.