Meet the Team

Jesse Kranz brings 30 years of technology experience to AjaxChess.com, along with a B.S. in Computer & Electrical Engineering and an M.B.A. in Finance (magna cum laude). He served as a Captain in the United States Air Force and was deployed as a Combat Communications Officer during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Noble Eagle.

Chess has been central to Jesse's life since fourth grade. By junior high he was training under one of the nation's most successful scholastic coaches, working with three master-rated coaches, and competing daily. From 8th through 12th grade he ranked among the top 35 scholastic players in the United States, and in eighth grade won both the Minnesota Open and Closed tournaments for players rated under 2000.

In high school, Jesse ran an elementary chess club at his former school and mentored a dyslexic second grader in special education. By having him record his moves after every game, Jesse helped build the focus and discipline that contributed to the student rising to first in math and moving into mainstream English within a year.

"Chess has shaped the way I think and lead. It taught me strategic planning, pattern recognition, emotional control under pressure, and the importance of preparation."

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Richard Cross is the co-founder and CFO of Regis Consulting. He holds an MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (concentrations in Entrepreneurship and Economics), a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and undergraduate degrees in Physics and Economics from Louisiana State University.

His finance career spans quantitative trading support at Bank of America, energy and infrastructure finance at AEP Energy, and a decade as Head Teaching Assistant for Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity at the University of Chicago. His technical career runs in parallel: site reliability engineering, DevOps, and cloud architecture at Bank of America, HERE Technologies, and Truepill, with certifications in AWS SysOps, Cisco CCST Networking, and Six Sigma.

Richard is also a co-author on 72 publications with the ZEUS Collaboration at DESY in Hamburg — the same experiment where he and Bill Murray first crossed paths. He first launched Minesweeper.org in 1999 and AjaxChess.com in 2007, and is now bringing the Vibe Coding approach to web development.

William Murray is the Chief Technology Officer of AjaxChess.com and co-founder of FiberXL, where he has served as system and database administrator and managed IT operations. Previously a data scientist at Analytic Innovations working on the Discover Card Fee Products account, Bill holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Indiana University and postdoctoral research experience at the ZEUS experiment.

Bill spent a few years at ZEUS (way back in the 90's) hunting for unlikely (but potentially earth-shaking) hypothesized phenomena (things like leptoquarks and evidence of substructure inside electrons). Didn't find any evidence of such things (which is why he's not a famous tenured professor) but the ZEUS experiment set some good limits.

Oh, chess, right. That. In Bill's own words:

"When I was very young there was this famous guy who suddenly hit the news in a grand face-off against the good old Soviet Onion (long since peeled itself) called Bobby Fisher. Suddenly I wanted to learn chess…I didn't know anybody who played, but my dad got me a book. (Wanna learn something, I teach myself from a book).

A few years later, I found a copy of 'Chess Variations: Ancient, Regional, and Modern' by John Gollon at the local library. I then realized chess is not a game, it is a whole family of games. I got very very interested in this phenomenon then.

In high school, I was on the chess team, of course. For a history class, we were told to 'write about the history…of anything' so I chose chess. As an undergrad at UIUC, I played a few low stakes tourneys in my dorm…did good, didn't win top prize. In graduate school, I found a few other physics students who were enthusiastic players and occasionally used to visit Indianapolis for weekend tournaments. Think my rating topped out a little below class A (1600 or 1700-something or other?) but I did once beat a rated expert.

In my working scientist days: was among the crowd-of-the-clobbered at an expo in Hamburg where a master put on a big simul. Put up an account on fics (am 'gwarp') and spent a lot of time there.

In the big bad 21st century…not a LOT of focus on chess (until recently) Dr. Cross (met him when he was a graduate student at ZEUS) convinced me to help him write the ORIGINAL ajaxchess.com site. It was never a big deal back then, but as Richard says: 'We're putting the band back together.' And now we have ambition. These days I'm often on chessvariants.com (username 'scholarhog') and I'm responsible for the atrocity called Warchess found there (which I first dreamed up in 1984 or sometime about then). I'm a big fan of variants, well, many of them anyway, and play a handful regularly on that site. My 'toroidal chess' variant should show up here sometime."

Gisela Velazco is an Oracle Database Architect, Cloud Engineer, and AI Solutions Specialist with over two decades of experience building and operating mission-critical data infrastructure at enterprise scale. Her career spans high-availability telecommunications systems, large-scale Data Warehouse architecture, and cloud modernization — including 14 years supporting a regional telecommunications provider operating across Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where her work underpinned the data infrastructure for over 50 million customers.

Today, Gisela works at the intersection of enterprise databases and applied artificial intelligence. She designs and implements RAG pipelines, vector search systems, and LLM-powered automation directly on Oracle 23ai — translating cutting-edge AI capabilities into production-ready database environments. Her technical foundation spans SQL and PL/SQL performance tuning, ETL architecture, cloud infrastructure on OCI and AWS, and Python-driven AI workflows. She is certified in Oracle AI Vector Search, OCI Generative AI, and Autonomous Database 23ai, with hands-on expertise in embeddings, semantic search, and hybrid query execution.

What sets her apart is the rare combination of deep operational experience — managing hundreds of production Oracle instances across multi-country, 24/7 environments — and genuine fluency in modern AI engineering. She has delivered breakthrough results throughout her career, including optimizing a critical business process from weeks to seconds, and successfully rescuing a large-scale platform where multiple previous teams had failed.

Bilingual in English and Spanish, Gisela brings both the technical depth and cross-cultural range to lead AI and database initiatives across Latin America and the United States.

Earl is our director of research and development and does much of the hands-on in-the-trenches task of getting the AI to turn what we want into something that really works. He therefore works closely with all other core team members, who dump conundra on him that he systematically chews up and transforms into code.

Earl hails from the small town of Tecumseh, Michigan and, loyal to his native state, studied physics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Much of his journey towards his Ph.D. was spent at the MARK II/SLC experiment at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) where the dozen universities that constituted the MARK II collaboration studied many things, but is best known for physics of the Z boson. Earl was focused on a rather niche phenomenon known as "beamstrahlung" which is quite important to particle physicists, but which most of you (thankfully) needn't worry about.

At SLAC, Earl met another member of MARK II, another graduate student from one of the other 12 universities (Bill Murray, also involved in this adventure), because University of Michigan and Indiana University were in deep cahoots over improving muon finding abilities of the detector.

Dr. Gero's niche expertise allowed him to serve as a post-doctoral research scientist in Italy at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, where he looked into details unfit for the layman not seeking a bedtime story to bore them to sleep.

Earl eventually escaped research science for the same reason Richard and Bill did: lack of funding. With no more big bad Soviet Union to fear, the U.S. decided to stop wasting money on projects like particle physics (which has only turned out a few silly spinoffs like the Internet and medical (N)MRI machines).

Through a friend named Anne (who also did her doctorate on the MARK II/SLC project) who also escaped academia for the world of big data, Earl landed a role as a leading data scientist at Analytic Innovations working on the Discover Card Fee Products account. Earl and Annie were so impressive that they even got Bill (there he is again) hired there too.

When Analytic Innovations fell over, Richard and Bill (who had been working on other projects...which eventually turned into Regis Consulting) needed an ace programmer who we knew we could trust with the tough stuff, so naturally we grabbed Earl. Earl is our Chief of Research and Development for our website (essentially run by Regis Consulting) and so he's still a keyboard warrior.