The Blend Dynamics Story
Blend Dynamics, LLC is the culmination of many years of experience and dedicated development to bring the SystemBlend™ application suite to life.
Our team has worked on countless team-of-teams Simulink projects distributed across multiple groups and companies. While the projects always began with enthusiasm, that often gave way to frustration when challenges would become the schedule driver.
We kept seeing the same problems across projects and found a common cause: The teams could not precisely define, understand, and properly implement the interfaces. This resulted in countless cross-team debugging cycles and wasted time.
The desire to address these problems sparked an idea that became a passion. After much trial and error and flagging enthusiasm of our own, we developed the SystemBlend solution, so engineers can snap subsystem models together like Lego blocks.
About Our Team
Mary Rygaard is the President & CEO of Blend Dynamics, with over 25 years of experience in software development, server development, web technologies, and cloud computing. Before founding Blend Dynamics, she worked for Mentor Graphics, Citrix Systems, Symbol Technologies, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Lockheed Martin. Her experience includes Java application and server-side technologies (JEE), JavaScript, REST services, databases, and UI development, both on Windows and Linux systems.
Mary received her Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University and certificates in object-oriented programming and distributed computing from UC Santa Cruz and San Jose State University. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Huntsville Association of Small Businesses in Advanced Technology (HASBAT).
Blend Dynamics Chief Technology Officer Chris Rygaard has over 35 years of experience in modeling and simulation, and has worked on several team-of-teams simulations, including:
- A target simulation spanning multiple locations at Lockheed Martin
- The ABIR simulation supported by multiple companies, including MDA, MIT/LL, and AMRDEC
- A laser battle manager model at Lockheed Martin for inclusion into strategic battle simulation
- Two satellite simulations spanning multiple departments in Boeing
- A national airspace simulation between NASA and multiple contractors
- An interceptor simulation across multiple departments at Lockheed
His memberships include the Alabama Modeling & Simulation Council (AMSC) and the Huntsville Association of Small Businesses in Advanced Technology (HASBAT), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and he has been active in IEEE for over 26 years. He is also a lifetime member of the Alpha Sigma Nu honor society.
Chris has been awarded 7 patents in cybersecurity and 3 patents spacecraft airlock systems.
Chris received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University, with an emphasis on control theory.