Scientific research & academia

R&D organisations, research institutes, labs, universities and scientific data communities.

55 contributions across 5 experiences

Where this industry appears in the career

Often together withBiopharma, global health & life sciences Public sector & international organisations Agriculture, food & environment Manufacturing, chemicals & industrials Technology consulting & IT services Logistics & supply chain

2019–202416 contributions

DSM-Firmenich

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.
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.
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.
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.
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 global knowledge management and community building, coordinating the authoring of 1,000+ pages of lab R&D content with AI.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.

2002–201113 contributions

United Nations CGIAR

Member of the Academic Committee of the Faculty of Engineering in Information Science at the University of Rome San Paolo, supervising 40+ master’s theses on digital and data science.
Designed a new data governance framework for the UN agency IPGRI (International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), aligned with DAMA and applying ISO/IEC 27001 principles, setting data-management standards for global agricultural research.
Designed the R&D bioinformatics data standard “Darwin Core Germplasm”, extending the Darwin Core international standard for agrobiodiversity analytics, presented at the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference 2010 in Woods Hole, USA.
Designed and managed 40+ institutional knowledge-management platforms — intranets, repositories, websites and scientific databases — and rationalised them into about a dozen governed platforms under common taxonomy, metadata and governance standards.
Led global initiatives across digital, data science, knowledge management and bioinformatics, progressing from Multimedia Web Specialist to Digital Unit Head with responsibility for strategic planning and implementation.
Coached and managed teams on digital projects applied to plant genetics for food production in developing countries, motivating internal talent and external partners; created an Innovation Lab and innovation meetings to bring innovation into the organisation.
Built partnerships with universities, vendors and research institutes in data science, digital transformation and business intelligence.
Collaborated on international data-analytics projects on genomic datasets and global ontologies (PlantGDB, GBIF, AGROVOC, AIMS, Dublin Core).
Developed digital tools and methods for genetics and omics research for food production, including federated access, SOA services, RESTful applications and data standards.
Led the design, delivery and launch of the United Nations CGXchange Analytics Platform, enabling advanced analytics, data manipulation and cross-agency access for omics, germplasm, plant and species datasets. Evidence ↗
Developed a digital crop-identification platform combining taxonomies, scientific datasets and AI-assisted recognition for agricultural biodiversity research.
Developed data-visualisation portals for Asian tropical fruits and other agricultural datasets, launched in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to support research in Central Asia and developing countries.
Designed and developed “Information Finder”, a semantic-search portal for crop datasets and genetic material for agrobiodiversity and food-production research, launched at IFPRI in Washington DC.

202610 contributions

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

Aligns the Innovation Lab architecture and experimentation portfolio to Gavi 6 Strategy 2026–2030 “Data Visibility & Use”, so every experiment traces to programmatic impact on global immunisation delivery.
Established and operates the Innovation Lab’s experimental AI tooling estate on Microsoft Frontiers models in Azure — including Cowork, Copilot Claude, MS Scout and OpenClaw for agentic-AI experimentation and architecture evaluation, alongside Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry — under defined tool-selection rules, cost guardrails and an approved/excluded tooling list.
Principal AI Architect and Innovation Lab Coordinator consultant at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, leading the AI architecture practice behind global vaccination programmes; owns the end-to-end innovation lifecycle — idea, experimentation, outcomes, stabilisation, operationalisation — as operational deputy to the Innovation Lab Lead, and leads architecture definition and deployment across the AI portfolio.
Member of the Gavi architecture board, responsible for standards, investment prioritisation, solution assurance, exception management and technology-risk decisions; set up and coordinates the Gavi Innovation Lab.
Manages the Innovation Lab governance model, structuring innovation into three stepped streams (Ideation → Experimentation → Stabilisation) with five accountable roles, RACI ownership per activity, entry and exit criteria, and a rhythm of weekly experiment reviews, monthly idea reviews and quarterly approval sessions.
Manages dual-mode execution governance for experiments: in-house delivery with mandatory Platform Architect validation of capacity, skills, security guardrails and environments, and external delivery by vendors, startups and academia through a four-phase collaborator workflow with capability-based assessment, compliance checks and post-experiment partner evaluation.
Managed the Innovation Lab KPI framework across Innovation & Delivery, Business Impact and Engagement.
Supported the conversion of the Innovation Lab from a project team into a consumable internal service, defining five entry pathways by idea maturity, a guided intake routed on maturity, urgency and strategic alignment, and three graduated support levels; participated in the launch of the new Innovation Lab Office.
Leads change management for innovation adoption, codifying the Lab’s operating values (human-centric, inclusive, transparent, business-grounded, outcome-oriented, open, ethical) and the adoption mechanics behind them: executive sponsorship, a distributed network of local advocates, continuous field feedback loops and evidence-based impact narratives.
Maintains the Innovation Lab vendor capability matrix, benchmarking six global delivery partners across five domains — AI & Machine Learning, Blockchain & Digital Assets, Immersive & Emerging Tech, Automation & Data, Research & Innovation — as the mandatory input to external-executor selection.

2024–20253 contributions

EPAM Systems

Global pharmaceutical company: principal expert (GenAI, architecture, software engineering) supporting the AI Factory framework and global AI strategy; defined a reusable AI component framework and LLM/multi-agent orchestration for biomedical R&D and regulatory processes, and a global Community of Practice for AI knowledge sharing.
Global energy leader, Saudi Arabia: designed scalable AWS AI cloud platforms and end-to-end architectures across upstream, downstream, R&D, engineering, finance, HR, safety and supply chain, with LLM orchestration, multi-agent systems, RAG and LSTM models for R&D.
Global chemical manufacturer: lead architect for GenAI in R&D, engineering and production — semantic ingestion pipelines, RAG over structured and unstructured data, and a phased path from PoCs to multi-agent assistants on a modular, scalable architecture.

2012–20132 contributions

United Nations

Directed the integration of research data from 1,260 institutes worldwide through GBIF, spanning 358 taxonomies and ontologies, for analytics, reporting and scientific insight.
Engineered REST/SOA services enabling cross-agency interoperability for scientific and environmental data platforms.

Profile7 contributions

Across the career

Works across clinical-trial data strategy, TMF metadata, CTMS, eTMF, EDC integration, clinical time-series and regulated data ecosystems, partnering with Contract Research Organisations (CROs) to align clinical-trial data with CTMS, eTMF and EDC systems.
Applies ontology engineering, FAIR governance, knowledge graphs and structured metadata practices to improve scientific data interoperability.
Has delivered AI and data solutions for both scientific and commercial environments, from biomedical R&D and manufacturing to retail and local commerce.
Brings experience in R&D innovation, stakeholder management, partnership development, programme management, project management and executive decision support.
Designs scientific data ecosystems combining semantic search, ontology integration, knowledge management and global biodiversity datasets.
Converts unstructured scientific or commercial information — menus, catalogues, images, PDFs — into structured operational data using computer vision, LLMs, extraction pipelines and governed data models.
Applies semantic engineering — controlled vocabularies, OWL ontologies, multilingual taxonomy mapping — to improve discoverability, interoperability, harmonisation and reuse of complex research datasets.

Skills4 contributions

Skills & applied knowledge

Scientific and laboratory systems, including LIMS SampleManager 2.0, PIMS and CDS Chromeleon 7.2.
Advanced TYPO3 and Drupal engineering for enterprise-grade scientific, institutional and knowledge-management platforms.
R&D strategy and innovation-adoption practices in pharmaceutical and life-sciences organisations.
Architecture of scientific-data semantic-search systems using REST, SOA, metadata brokers, ontology-driven indexing and semantic retrieval.

All industries

Retail, consumer goods & e-commerce 55 Scientific research & academia 55 Public sector & international organisations 54 Biopharma, global health & life sciences 52 Agriculture, food & environment 30 Technology consulting & IT services 30 Logistics & supply chain 16 Manufacturing, chemicals & industrials 11 Banking & financial services 8 Media & publishing 4 Energy 2 Telecommunications 2