Moving Out of Academia to the Environment Industry event - Meet the Speakers

Manel is Industrial Engineer in Energy by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and Master in Technology Enterprise by IMD, Switzerland. He has more than 20 years’ experience leading and participating in national and international R&D projects in the field of energy systems and in large international scientific facilities such as CERN or ITER. He is Director of Corporate Development and Technology Transfer at the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) where he leads strategic alliances and projects. He has been CEO and co-founder of ISUNO Energy, and since 2020 he is also co-founder of Bamboo Energy, a spin off from IREC.

Giorgio has a PhD in Particle Physics, several years of experience in the forefront research and data science projects, in-depth analytical thinking, problem-solving and leadership attitudes.
He is currently working at E.ON’s Global Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence unit, leading several data science projects, from ideation and proof-of-concept to industrialization, on intelligent asset management, smart grids, and artificial intelligence driven energy economics. He likes carrying out his research and data science activities within large multicultural organizations: previously at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, CERN and currently at E.ON.
His expertise comprises large-scale and complex data analysis, development of simulation and advanced monitoring and forecasting tools. He has strong backgrounds in statistics, machine learning, as well as in data analytics and visualization, object-oriented programming in C++ and Python, and distributed computing. He enjoys learning new things, extracting quantitative and meaningful insights from large datasets, as well as coping everyday with challenges and problems that need quick and effective solutions.

Zofia joined ATLAS in 2004 as a Master student. In 2009 she obtained a PhD from the University of Copenhagen for her work on searches for New Physics using tau lepton signatures in the ATLAS detector. She continued  as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, working on the ATLAS trigger system and the novel measurement of the Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons. In 2013, she moved to Shell research hub and worked on multiple scattering and seismic imaging. Since 2018 she has been working for NIVA where she is responsible for ingestion, processing and modelling of various environmental data. She is prototyping and automating a novel screening technology based on a non target mass spectrometry data, as well as working with real time data streams from sensors, which may either be installed on (autonomous) vehicles or are static in the field.

James is a member of the Education, Communications and Outreach group at CERN. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Oxford and began his research career working at CERN in the mid-1980s. In 1993, he left research to become Head of Science with the British Council in Paris. After managing the Council’s bilateral programme of scientific visits, exchanges, bursaries and cultural events for two years, he returned to CERN in 1995 as a science writer. He was Head of the Organization’s Communications group from 2003 to 2015, before turning his attention to environmental reporting at CERN, while also assisting the SESAME laboratory in Jordan with communications during its start-up phase. He is co-author of ‘How the Web was Born’, a history of the Internet published in 2000 and described by the London Times as being among the year’s ten best books for inquisitive minds. In 2018, his second book, ‘CERN and the Higgs Boson: The Global Quest for the Building Blocks of Reality’, was published.