DSM-Firmenich
R&D Principal Data Scientist — EMEA
May 2019 – Feb 2024 · Kaiseraugst · Employment ended for economic reasons.
€70M+Projected value of the R&D portfolio delivered by a 15+ FTE organisation
€30M+ / yrProjected value of an AI digital twin replacing in-vivo UV-filter experiments
−48%Manufacturing-plant downtime cut by an AI digital twin
€1.5M / yrROI from AI-driven lab automation (chromatogram recognition)
FDAGlobal strategy for CDISC-SEND clinical data standards
−80%AI team turnover after a dedicated talent strategy
Skills usedAI governance, risk & regulatory complianceMachine learning, deep learning & MLOpsData Strategy for AIGenerative AI & LLM solutionsData architecture, engineering & governanceSemantic engineering & knowledge managementCloud & multi-tenant SaaS platformsInnovation & change managementTeam leadership & talent developmentBusiness value & financial managementProgramme, project & vendor managementExecutive advisory & pre-salesEntrepreneurship & venture buildingDigital marketing & customer analyticsCommunication & thought leadership
IndustriesScientific research & academiaBiopharma, global health & life sciencesAgriculture, food & environmentLogistics & supply chainManufacturing, chemicals & industrials
All 22 contributions
Leadership & value
- Managed a cross-disciplinary team of data scientists, PhD students, contractors and cloud developers (15+ FTEs), delivering commercial and R&D projects with over €70 million in projected value, recognised by DSM’s scientific community and leadership; nurtured international R&D partnerships with client partners up to C-level.
- Coached and led the Digital and Data Science core leadership team (3 FTE) within the broader 15+ FTE organisation — direct reports, team leads, technical leads, academic collaborators and matrixed delivery staff — with clear performance, capability and succession responsibilities.
- Managed an annual technology and innovation budget of about USD 500,000.
- Steering Committee member of the Corporate Research Program for Digital Transformation; co-authored the 2019 Digital Aiming Points for the global R&D digital strategy and contributed to the HR Talent Acquisition and Retention Strategy.
- Coordinated international Corporate Research Program (CRP) activities in Digital Transformation and the Digital Twin Lab — agile pilots for digital disruption, competence development and continuous improvement.
- Founded and led the Digital Hub in Poland, an agile, start-up-like AI research group with proven cost savings of €650,000 per year, and designed its Talent Acquisition Strategy for Digital and Data Science with retention guidelines, cutting AI team turnover by 80%.
- Coached regional data scientists and colleagues on data science and digital transformation for projects spanning 60+ R&D labs, 85 manufacturing plants and supply chain, chemistry, compound analytics, formulations, marketing and sales.
- Established mentoring, technical career paths, communities of practice, internal learning programmes and leadership coaching for AI practitioners, improving retention, engagement, promotion readiness and technical consistency.
- Fostered an innovation culture across the organisation, coordinating all departments to integrate new technologies and processes.
AI & data science delivery
- Pioneered an AI hybrid digital twin predicting unintended manufacturing-plant shutdowns that reduced downtime by 48% and earned the Best DSM Corporate Research Project award, using deep learning (LSTM, self-attention) on 768 real-time sensor streams and LLMs (GPT-3.5, Llama 2) in LangChain for maintenance-log interpretation.
- Implemented a production-grade MLOps framework for AI-driven lab automation (CNN/NLP chromatogram recognition), achieving €1.5M annual ROI and €1.2M annual savings through workflow automation.
- Led R&D on a new data-science model automating the identification and quantification of chemical compounds in chromatograms with neural networks, outperforming lab analysts in accuracy and precision, in partnership with Loughborough University (UK).
- Ideated and led research on an AI digital twin modelling the statistical distribution of sun-cream UV filters on skin, aiming to replace in-vivo experiments with digital solutions — a projected value of €30M+ per year.
- Led an information-retrieval project governing millions of lab documents with NLP and transformers (BERT, GPT) for keyword extraction and synonym generation, plus an ontology integrated with public data sources to improve research data interoperability.
- Led global knowledge management and community building, coordinating the authoring of 1,000+ pages of lab R&D content with AI.
- Led the development of a machine-learning model to reduce the causes of gas emissions in wastewater treatment plants for vitamins, providing concrete strategies for environmental impact reduction.
Governance, regulated data & partnerships
- Designed the data governance strategy for R&D and manufacturing on the DAMA Body of Knowledge, with policies, FAIRness guidelines, quality standards and data stewardship aligned to the corporate digital strategy.
- Developed the global strategy for adopting clinical-trial data standards, extending CDISC-SEND to animal nutrition research to enable rapid submission of results to the FDA.
- Applied validation-by-design for AI-enabled processes in pharmaceutical and clinical environments: requirements traceability, controlled documentation, test evidence, audit trails, change control and role-based approvals.
- Managed collaborations with Contract Research Organisations (CROs) for digital projects, establishing strategic partnerships for external AI/ML development and research.
- Created and coordinated a network of European academic partnerships for research in digital technologies applied to DSM business and marketing cases.
- Speaker at international pharma and health conferences on digital and data management, building DSM’s thought leadership in AI and data science.