Alison M. Yates
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
Executive and technology leader with 15+ years scaling organizations, launching products, and delivering measurable value across startups and global engineering environments — from physics research to AI/ML pipelines to board-level governance.
Experience
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
Structura Management, PLLC · Seattle, WA
2025 – Present
Consulting firm providing strategic asset management and project planning for large-scale structural, scientific, transportation, and energy-generation assets.
- Delivers strategic asset management and lifecycle planning to maximize client return on investment.
- Develops and executes business plans focused on firm growth and client acquisition in the energy and scientific sectors.
- Leads financial management, client relationships, and engagement delivery — translating technical risk into actionable investment decisions.
- Built OCR and computer vision pipelines to extract structured data from documents and images, improving downstream search and analytics.
- Implemented embedding-based retrieval and cosine similarity scoring to support clustering, matching, and ranking workflows.
- Evaluated and integrated vision foundation models (DINOv2) and TensorFlow-based approaches for feature extraction and classification.
Cofounder & CEO
Quarky Labs LLC · Seattle, WA
2018 – Present
Tech startup specializing in consumer mobile applications that simplify complex instructions through an intuitive UI.
- Grew company revenues at a CAGR of nearly 40% since launch.
- Delivered production-ready services and UIs using Python, Node.js APIs, and React front ends.
- Managed all aspects of the business: financials, content creation, backend automation, and AI integration.
Director of Product
Zemax LLC · Kirkland, WA
2012 – 2018
Global leader in optical product design software; PE-backed, successfully exited at sale in 2018.
- Doubled revenues within three years; raised customer retention from 72% to 85%.
- Expanded total addressable market from ~$200M to over $900M through new product roadmaps.
- Led a global, multidisciplinary team of 30 across six geographies.
- Improved organizational commitment post-acquisition, raising Glassdoor ratings from 2.0 to 4.9 stars.
- Developed and implemented recruiting, onboarding, and performance management frameworks.
Senior Optical Engineer
Lockheed Martin (formerly Aculight) · Bothell, WA
2005 – 2012
Designed and built high-performance, one-of-a-kind laser systems based on customer requirements in aerospace and defense.
Research Scientist
Cornerstone Research Group · Dayton, OH
1998 – 2005
- Awarded two patents for innovative optical polymers.
- Secured over half of the company's research funding.
Publications & Presentations
- —Plenary Speaker, Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (2019)
- —Invited Speaker, Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (2018)
- —Invited Talk: Negotiating Your Salary, Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (2018)
- —"Zemax promotes gender equity in its work culture," SPIE Professional Magazine — Featured Interviewee (2017)
- —Authored multiple peer-reviewed papers on high-power fiber lasers and optical engineering
Professional Activities & Community
- —Volunteer Math Instructor, University Beyond Bars at Monroe Correctional Complex · 2017
- —Mentor for Startups, Seattle Startup Week · 2019 – 2020
- —Judge, Foster School of Business (UW) MBA Business Plan Competition · 2022 – 2024
- —Judge, Dempsey Startup Competition, University of Washington · 2022 – 2024
- —Judge, Black Ambition Prize · 2023 – 2024
- —Speaker & Mentor, Undergraduate Creating a Company, UW · 2023 – 2024
- —Partner & Fast Pitch Coach, Social Venture Partners · 2018 – 2021
Testimonials
"Alison has done a great job of building out the European Engineering Services team. She communicates effectively with Board members and makes great contributions by stepping up to tasks that need to be done."
"Alison's strengths in quantitative, data-driven decision-making stand out. She actively seeks out opinions of other thought leaders and leverages their insights. She has a drive and passion for knowledge and success."
"Her technical knowledge and communication skills make her the number one draft pick for any team. She leads by example and is a fantastic team player."
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