The Team at Volv Global SA
The Team at Volv Global SA
The Volv Team
Christopher has over 30 years' experience as a technology entrepreneur and business advisor, having worked for many Blue-Chip organisations helping to solve their critical global scale data problems.
Highlights of his distinguished career include:
He has dual Austrian/UK nationality and currently resides in Lausanne, Switzerland with his family. Outside of work, he enjoys music, skiing, hiking, walking Otto, and cooking.
She qualified with a BSc in Geography and Ecology and she is still passionate about sustainability and the environment. In her career, she was responsible for opening and establishing two new technology consultancy businesses in the UK, which included supporting the delivery of projects as well as managing the operational side of the company's affairs.
With over 25 years of experience and knowledge, she now wants to share with others what she has learned with a focus on culture, values, and sustainable growth.
She is a UK citizen and currently residing in Lausanne, Switzerland with her family. Outside of work, Heidi spends time with her family and friends, reading, skiing, hiking, walking Otto, and being near to the sea as much as possible.
Léon has over 20 years of experience working for several different pharmaceutical and health technology companies in a variety of global, regional, and local clinical development and operational roles. Throughout his career, he has taken a creative, keen interest in tackling the numerous challenges in developing healthcare solutions, engaging and inspiring people and teams to take a strong cross-functional and cross-disciplinary approach to drive forward the development of and access to innovative new treatment options for patients.
Born and raised in The Netherlands, Léon holds an MSc Degree in Biology, specialising in Medical Biology, graduating from Leiden University. Besides living in The Netherlands, he has resided and worked in various European countries, including the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Outside work, his favourite pastimes include skiing, hiking, and water sports which he enjoys with his family.
Adel joined the Data Science team as a Senior Data Scientist in January 2022. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a background in artificial intelligence and software engineering.
His Ph.D. work focused on developing AI approaches to recommend experiments to help biologists model complex gene regulatory interactions. For five years, he developed his know-how by achieving several data science projects, mainly in IoT and the life science industry.
He is a French citizen living in Geneva with his wife. He likes hiking, biking, travelling, and playing board games with his relatives.
Vassia holds an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, an M.Sc. in Life Sciences and Technology, and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, obtained over a 14-year period of study at the NTUA (Athens) and EPFL (Lausanne).
During her Ph.D. she worked on reinforcement and on surprise-derived learning, developing novel algorithms that detect changes and adapt efficiently to new situations, and identifying signatures of such algorithms in human brain recordings and behaviour. Her two main projects have both been published in peer-reviewed journals, in the fields of computational neuroscience, learning, and neuroimaging.
Previously, she was a research engineer in a Swiss-based brain-technology start-up, working at the intersection of neuroscience, biosensing, engineering, mixed reality, and AI, and she conducted the initial validation of the company’s technology. Throughout the course of her studies and working career, she has worked with a wide range of high-dimensional datasets (such as electronic medical records) and machine learning techniques, as well as with EEG and FMRI technologies.
She is passionate about finding ways that AI can be deployed in the service of humanity.
Vassia also has a passion for chocolate and enjoys reading literature, running, and spending time with friends and loved ones.
During his studies, Martin joined the EPFL’s Intelligent Global Health Laboratory, a research group dedicated to the development of machine learning to improve healthcare in resource-limited settings. In it, he published a paper as a first author at the NeurIPS conference about a new personalised federated learning method that he invented to solve the problem of data governance and privacy, both extremely important to the future of digital health.
Previously, he worked for 6 months at the CHUV in the oncology department. The project he worked on aimed to automatically label cells in H&E (Hematoxylin and Eosin) images by transferring information from mIF (Multiplex Immunofluorescence) images. His work on registration between the two types of images and deep learning models achieved excellent results with an accuracy of about 93% at the end of the project, compared to a maximum accuracy of 78% at the beginning.
In his spare time, he likes to row on the lake and hike in places he has never been. If the weather isn't on his side, he'll probably go and have a good beer with his friends.
Vahid holds a M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and numerous years of experience as a senior researcher, where he successfully conducted and led scientific projects in renowned international universities, including SUT (Tehran, Iran), SISSA (Trieste, Italy), EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), and UNIGE (Geneva, Switzerland).
Over the years, Vahid has developed and acquired expertise in creating advanced analytical tools, machine learning algorithms, and computational models. His work spans various applications, such as utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare (e.g. to quantify depth of anesthesia using electroencephalogram signals), as well as addressing fundamental scientific questions concerning sensory processing, decision-making, and working memory in the brain. The results of Vahid's research have been disseminated through presentations at various international conferences and publications in prestigious journals within the field IDA, PNAS, Cell Report, Neuron and PLoS Biology.
In addition to his academic achievements, Vahid has gained valuable commercial experience in the med-tech sector and worked closely with clinicians in healthcare settings. More recently, Vahid worked as a senior data scientist at a green-tech company. In this role, he focused on the development of machine learning models for predicting crop health and stress.
Vahid combines his scientific mindset, data science skills, and commercial experience to bring valuable contributions to Volv.
Born and raised in the Canary Islands, Spain, David is a data scientist with a passion for deep learning and computer vision and is an entrepreneur at heart. During his time at UPV, he published research papers in prestigious conferences such as NeurIPS, AAAI, and the JRC. He has also worked in international organisations such as the European Patent Office for almost two years working as a Young Professional Data Scientist. His responsibilities included automation, big data, and numerous machine-learning projects.
David is driven by a desire to leverage technology to make a positive impact on the world and is always eager to take on new challenges.
He is also an avid participant in hackathons, where they apply their skills in artificial intelligence to create innovative solutions. He also uses this knowledge to create gifts.
In his free time, David can be found playing board games, video games, and spending time outdoors, especially windsurfing and playing beach volleyball during the summer.
To be continued
By setting an example with his exemplary behaviour, social skills, and calm presence Otto ensures the team can perform at their best, with the least amount of stress. He can be relied upon to give anyone working in the office the perfect pause to play ball with him. Occasionally, he makes his presence felt on a Teams call too! He also made his debut appearance at the WODC EU 2022 in Sitges, by aiding the team at the Volv booth with a conversational opener and by meeting and greeting other delegates as they passed by, giving them the necessary excuse for some dog therapy.
He is a German citizen, currently residing in Lausanne, Switzerland with his family. Outside of work, his time is spent with his family and other whippet friends especially Frida, chasing toboggans, sprinting after a ball, paddleboarding, and swimming.
The Associates of Volv
Volv values our collaboration with a group of very select associates.
Mike is a chemistry graduate and qualified accountant, with over 25 years of enterprise sales and sales management experience. He had the golden opportunity to work with IBM and completed the full sales training academy before moving into enterprise sales. He then spent several years at SAP working on their next-generation mobility services where he was a top performer. Following that, Mike decided to bring his full skills and experience to bear in a completely different category of companies: tech start-ups, working to generate sales pipelines, and closing large deals that helped to bring their growth and success.
In his spare time, he loves training for an occasional marathon, weightlifting, and is also an avid reader.
As a Solution Architect I have 20+ Years of experience in analysis, design, and development of client/server, web (cloud) based and n-tier applications using the Microsoft technology stack;
In addition, I have 10+ years of experience as a Chief Technology Officer in managing Software Development Teams and advising a wide range of clients on their technological strategies.
Previously Rich was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, Professor of both Management and Mechanical Engineering at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and co-founder and Chief Scientist of the ICASA Institute at New Mexico Tech.
His scientific work has been recognized through research and best paper awards from NASA, DoD, DOE, IEEE, ACM, SIAM, AACC, ASME, and SCI, and has been successfully deployed in numerous high-consequence settings.
He has received teaching awards from ASME and ASEE, and taught short courses on data science at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Immediately after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 he was asked by senior leadership within the US DoD to head an interdisciplinary team in the development of computational techniques for discovering and assessing terrorist-related threats.
Rich received BS (Honours) and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Robotics at the California Institute of Technology.
He is an avid runner, and divides his time between Santa Fe, USA and Sithonia, Greece.
Previously Kristin was a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, Professor of Computer Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Principal Investigator at the National Center for Genome Resources, and co-founder and Senior Scientist of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Systems Analysis at New Mexico Tech.
Her scientific work has been recognized through research and best paper awards from NASA, DoD, DOE, IEEE, ACM, and SIAM. She has served as an Editor for the International Journal of Robotics and Automation and the Proceedings of Complex 2012, and as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation.
She has taught short courses on analytics for discovery and prediction at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Kristin received BS Degrees in Quantitative Business Analysis and Computer Science from The Pennsylvania State University, MS and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering from New Mexico State University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Robotics at the California Institute of Technology.
She divides her time between Santa Fe, USA and Sithonia, Greece, and in her spare time enjoys swimming, hiking, and reading.
Pascal is qualified with an MSc in Materials Science and Engineering from ETH Zürich. He has worked in or with medical device start-ups for over 10 years and has extensive knowledge in bringing innovative devices to the market in Europe and the US. He has worked at the interface between start-ups and global players for several years on different collaborations and innovation projects in that space and has successfully cleared them.
He is passionate about bringing new treatment options to patients and professionals alike by collaborating with companies and authorities to get the necessary market clearances.
In his free time (?) he likes working on his hobby farm looking after his goats, writing creative posts on LinkedIn, and spending time in the outdoors with his family.
Julie... to be continued
Kim has been working with Volv since 2020, helping to develop thought leadership articles and blogs, writing press releases, and generally writing Volv content for both internal and external purposes.
Kim has more than 20 years of experience as a writer and editor in the life sciences industry. Previously, she was a journalist, working for daily newspapers and magazines in the UK and Australia, and before becoming a freelance copywriter in 2001, worked for the Dow Jones Business News in the U.S. She has a Degree in English from the University of Cape Town and an Honours Degree in Sustainability, with a focus on public-private partnerships for developing world diseases, from Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.
Kim is an Australian citizen and lives in Perth, Australia with her husband, an ageless cat, and two Bernese Mountain Dogs, which by rights should make her an honorary Swiss citizen. She is also a triathlete, loves travelling, reading, music, and theatre.