Brian Freyburger, Williamsville North High School, Class of 1989  

Brian Freyburger is a computer programming wizard and an entrepreneur who honed his skills in the high-tech soils of Silicon Valley and the global financial hub of New York City. He developed state-of-the-art technology to create beautiful smiles and was a pioneer in web navigation and analytics.

As an undergraduate Computer Science major at Cornell University, Brian’s summer internships were at Sim Graphics in Pasadena, CA, one of the first companies in the field of Virtual Reality, and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), authoring a new computer language.  This programming language, which he called ‘Betty’, was used as the teaching language for the honors track introductory class of Computer Science students at Cornell for many years.  After earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science from Cornell, he continued his studies at Stanford University as a doctoral candidate.

At Stanford, he researched both programming languages and computer graphics, which included work with 3D printing technologies and processes. In 1997, he left Stanford after earning another master's degree, and joined three other Stanford graduate students in creating Align Technology and inventing the Invisalign Orthodontic System, an alternative to braces that has revolutionized the orthodontics industry.  Intensive research in computer-aided design (CAD) modeling, digital capture the geometry of objects, and 3D printers was necessary to get the aligners on track. Ultimately, Brian and his team perfected the necessary technologies for “incremental retainers”, which led to 15 patents and a multi-billion dollar company. Shortly after receiving FDA approval for the orthodontic devices in 1998, Brian left Align Technologies to pursue opportunities in other industries, including the world of finance. 

Brian attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, where he received a Master of Business Administration. He continued to be involved in several startups including Alexa Internet, a database company that revolutionized Web navigation.  Brian was the technical liaison when Amazon acquired Alexa in 1999 and he worked with Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, to develop groundbreaking toolbar software for the online retail giant. Brian went on to serve as Chief Technology Officer at several high frequency trading firms in New York and Chicago where he developed and managed core technologies and platforms to support worldwide trading systems.   Currently, Brian is with Hudson River Trading (HRT), a multi-asset class quantitative trading firm based in New York City, which utilizes automated trading algorithms and an extremely high-performance computing environment to trades stocks, options, futures, currencies and bonds around the world.

While a student at Williamsville North, Brian actively participated in a variety of extracurricular activities including football, track, Science Olympiad and Mathletes. In addition to his contributions to the field of computer technology, Brian supports many charities, particularly those dedicated to children and the environment.