Hannah is president of Nimbus Online, our subsidiary that deals with qualitative research, and she serves on the board of Cascade Strategies, where she has responsibilities as a Senior Project Manager. She graduated from the University of Washington in 2022 with a BA in Communications and has a passion for healthcare-related research. She has worked on quite a number of Cascade Strategies healthcare-related projects, including projects for Blue Cross Blue Shield, Kaiser Permanente, Optum Health, CareOregon, the Child Mind Institute, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and more.
about us
Cascade Strategies is a highly innovative market research firm based in Bellevue, WA. The firm is composed largely of career strategists and researchers who have mastered many of the most complex and advanced methodologies available to the research world, while at the same time maintaining a strong base of traditional quantitative and qualitative research projects for clients.
The company has been headquartered in the Seattle area since 1991. Members of Cascade’s professional staff come from all over the US and have amassed a combined 124 years of research experience. Cascade’s clients cover a wide range of industries including health care, financial services, high tech, retail, foodservice, and many others.
Hannah Johnson, Senior Project Manager, Board Member
Lauren Johnson, Senior Project Manager, Board Member
Lauren is president of MDSA, Inc., our subsidiary that develops AI applications. She is also on the Cascade Strategies board, and she serves Cascade as Senior Project Manager. Lauren graduated from the University of Washington in 2020 with a BA in Psychology. She has managed a variety of sophisticated projects for Cascade in the fields of high tech, retail, health care, financial services, travel and leisure, and more. She has deep proficiency in patient satisfaction studies, competitive analysis, statistical analysis and modeling, and pattern recognition in large datasets.
Alexey Mykhaylov, Group Director of Business Operations
Alexey has been a leader in technology and business operations for 20+ years. His passion for technology and management has earned him success as an entrepreneur on multiple continents. He holds a Masters in Management Sciences and a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Kharkiv Technical University in Ukraine. Alexey is fluent in English, Russian, and Ukrainian and is a current resident of Vancouver, Canada.
Elena Besedina, Lead Project Manager
Elena plays a crucial role as lead Project Manager for technical solutions and products. She brings 14 years of experience in Project Management and QC Engineering, covering projects in the high tech, retail and healthcare industries. She holds dual Masters degrees in Informatics and Financial Systems from Kharkiv National University in Ukraine.
Eric Layland, Group Marketing Director
Eric is in a select group of people who have been involved in digital marketing since its earliest days (remember CompuServe?). His primary duties include client relations, defining the strategic vision for Cascade, AI market opportunities, and evangelizing insight-driven decision support. Prior to joining Cascade, he served as Founder and CEO of Confluence Digital, a Seattle-based digital marketing agency.
Jerry Johnson, Senior Analyst, Board Member
Jerry has led teams conducting advanced market research for leading worldwide clients such as Expedia, Siemens, and HP. He is experienced in contemporary Data Science, Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning, AI. He has writen over 1,500 market research reports and presented more than 700 research reports to senior-level clients and corporate boards. Jerry received his B.A. in Government from Harvard University.
Ari Hollander, Senior Programmer
Ari worked with Dr. Kimberley Osberg at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington on research projects including some of the earliest VR therapy applications and did consulting and educational VR projects for clients including Boeing, Microsoft, Edmark, Hewlett-Packard, and Disney. Ari took a brief detour during the Dot Com Era to work on two start-ups, one in 3D eCommerce and the other in dramatic, story-focused massively multi-player online game technology. After a subsequent stint involving the Unreal Engine and art tools design in the Microsoft Game Studios, he decided to get back into virtual reality and build his first Post-traumatic Stress Disorder therapy application, for suicide bomb attack victims (instead of building computer games that allowed people to pretend they were terrorists).
Howard Rose, Senior Programmer
Howard’s strong suit is transforming complex problems and content into stories and experiences that are engaging and effective for the end users. In doing so, Howard draws on his diverse background in instructional design, psychology and his past incarnations as a videographer and musician. Howard got hooked on VR and real-time interactive computers as a graduate student and researcher at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. Growing from this realization and his own thesis research exploring virtual environments for teaching Japanese language (Zengo Sayu), Howard began to focus on a mission putting these technologies and approaches to work to recast teaching and learning.
