About Us: Leadership Team
The Minds Behind Our Technology
T. Christopher "Chris" Dalessandri
President/CEO and Co-Founder
Chris Dalessandri has been programming since his early teen years, and has 15 years of professional software development and design experience in everything from student information systems to business analysis tools and survey engines. Prior to co-founding OWL and Prismatic Consulting with Irwin Hurst, Chris gained a wealth of software architecture and programming experience, across a variety of industries, through positions with Pitt Ohio Express, Full Tilt, CommerBuilder, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Computer People, and Retail Control Systems. A member of several language-related organizations, Chris is a sought-after speaker who regularly presents on the many benefits of teacher-driven language assessments at national conferences hosted by ACTFL, NADSFL, CALICO, IALLT, and DigitalStream. Through the experience of working with language professionals in creating OWL Testing Software, Chris himself was brought back to the language learning community, where he continues to study Spanish both in the U.S. and abroad.
Irwin Hurst
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder
Irwin brings 15-plus years of experience in enterprise software design and development to OWL Testing Software, which he co-founded with his college friend Chris Dalessandri. He takes pride in his contributions toward the development of cutting-edge solutions in multimedia search and retrieval, data integration, and in his role in the launching of Rightanswers.com, one of the first vertical search engines for knowledge management. Prior to OWL, Irwin was a key member of Freemarkets' (now Ariba) internal software development team where he coordinated IT efforts to link the back-office internal systems with the revenue-generating hosted auctioning software. Irwin's unique combination of technical knowledge, business savvy, and leadership skills allowed him to take responsibility for building the development team, implementing development methodologies and quality standards, and designing an integration architecture for synchronizing complex computing systems as part of the acquisition by Ariba. Irwin was also a leading member of the R&D team at MediaSite, a spin-off of Carnegie Mellon University, where he helped turn first-of-its-kind speech recognition and video search technology into software used by product engineers.
Len Brush
Senior Advisor, Higher Education
Veteran technology expert Len Brush has more than 40 years of experience serving the information technology, networking, and systems integration needs of institutions of higher education such as Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State University, and Loyola University. Len’s expertise ranges from planning, designing, developing, and implementing enterprise-wide information systems to process reengineering, data security, and disaster recovery
Richard “Dick” Smith
Chief Financial Officer & Lead Recruiter
Dick Smith possess more than 35 years of experience leading successful organizations with skills in all core operational and financial functions. He founded, grew, and sold a prosperous financial services firm, then joined Omega Systems in various high level positions—including Board of Directors and CFO. Dick eventually helped execute the sale of the company to Keane Inc. Most recently, Dick has provided executive coaching and strategic planning services for businesses, and is excited to put his skills to work for OWL Testing Software.