Thomas Halfmann has more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing IT and automation in the life sciences industry. After various management positions at Novartis, including Head Global Project Office, Global MES Program Manager and Global Head Biopharmaceutical Operations IT, Thomas founded the international life sciences consulting company HGP in 2008. HGP had offices in Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Poland and Indonesia and was acquired by NNIT in 2019. Since October 2019 Thomas has been the global head of production IT for NNIT.

Christian Wölbeling is senior director of global accounts at Werum IT Solutions based in Lueneburg, Germany, part of the Körber Medipak Systems Group. Werum IT Solutions is the world’s leading supplier of manufacturing execution systems (MES) and manufacturing IT solutions for the pharmaceutical and bio­pharmaceutical industries. Its PAS-X software product is run by the majority of the world’s top 30 pharmaceutical and biotech companies and also by many mid-sized manufacturers including leading global Chinese pharmaceutical or­ganisations. He holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. For more than 28 years working in life sciences manufacturing IT, Christian has had great experience in all GMP related processes. He has broad activities inside the ISPE as founder and chairman of the special interest group Pharma 4.0, ISPE’s GAMP MES special interest group co-chair, ISPE GAMP member at large of the Euro­pean Steering Committee, Knowledge Network Council chair, PAT and Lifecycle Control Strategy CoP steering member, and ISPE Affiliate DACH board member.

Richard Denk studied mechanical engineering and did an examination on experts of GMP, qualification and validation, pharmaceutical auditing, pharmaceutical engineering, and quality control at the University of Applied Sciences in Albstadt/Sigmaringen, Germany. Richard works at SKAN AG, headquartered in Allschwil, as the head of sales containment, and eight years ago he founded the expert containment group of the ISPE DACH. The containment group published the Containment Manual in September 2015. Richard has spent nearly 20 years working with highly active/highly hazardous substances and has developed the containment pyramid.

Jorge Amorocho joined Pharmaplan in April 2016. Jorge leads the disciplinary team of oral solid dosage at Pharmaplan and developed the workstream area of mixed reality with applications on the pharmaceutical sector. In his time at Pharmaplan Jorge has been a member of project teams with a focus on process technology in the area of solids handling and tablet manufacturing. Jorge counts currently with experience in diverse projects along different phases, starting from the conceptual design through basic and detail design up to construction and qualification phase. Since 2018 Pharmaplan has developed its own solutions in the area of virtual reality, facilitating its customers with virtual mock-ups and training of personnel. There have been many experiences applying virtual reality solutions inside the projects of Pharmaplan, accelerating in this way the decision-making across the project phases.

A Pharmaceutical Engineer with more than 15 years of experience in project management, construction management, commissioning and consulting in the pharmaceutical, biotech and cosmetics industry. Focused on aseptic fill-finish & packaging projects for liquid, semi solids and solid forms.

With over 30 years’ experience in pharmaceuticals, Marcel has held various positions and roles, was actively involved in reorganizations, integration, and separation after takeovers and business splits. 

As a world-renowned and respected expert in MOMS, Operations, IT, Serialization Track & Trace he can translate regulatory and business requirements to practical, cost‑effective, innovative automation, and IT solutions. 

In addition to being active in various industry groups, and a Board Member and speaker at many congresses, Marcel is also the Executive Director of the OPEN Serialization Communication Standard Group.

The OPEN-SCS Working Group is a consortium of life sciences companies and solution providers who have developed an industry standard for interoperability of serialization components. The Working Group belongs to the non-profit organization OPC Foundation.

Dr. Dieter Peters has 30-plus years of experience as a global operations executive in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry – turn arounds, profit improvement, reliability, and supply chain optimization. He advises senior leaders and their teams to develop strategies and their execution to transform their business by involving their people in an operational excellence culture aligned along the value chain to deliver increased cash flow, reduced risk exposure, and grow profit and business. Regions: North America, South America, Europe. Former positions: general manager and board member, EVP global product supply, site director, VP R&D organic chemicals, business analyst.

Dr. Mothivel (Mothi) Mummudi graduated from Iowa State University with a PhD degree in chemicals. He has spent more than a decade in various roles within the chemical process industries applying fundamental process knowledge to solve process/product development challenges to advance modelling and data sci­ence techniques. He has been chairing data science forums in the USA and has published papers around predictive analytics. (His patent details: Limit based threshold estimation for prognostics and health management, Issued Novem­ber 13, 2018 United States US10126209B2). He is currently the global director of Tridiagonal’s process consulting practice and drives advanced modelling and data science practice.

Miran Denac is responsible for the Israel, Asia-Pacific and respiratory manufactur­ing in Teva Pharmaceuticals. This comprises currently 10 final dosage production plants with approximately 4,000 employees and various production technologies. He held previously a cluster lead role in Europe and site general manager positions in Teva, including Germany (Merckle, Ratiopharm) and Croatia (Pliva). Before that, he worked in various technical and sales roles in the Swiss mechanical indus­try, with a significant international export market orientation. Miran graduated in chemical engineering and completed a PhD at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. His recent business focus has been on site network consolidation, efficiency and reliability in manufacturing and supply in a competi­tive generic market as well as implementation of digitalisation projects for better business performance.

Praveen Kapse is the vice president of global strategy and innovation at Tridiago­nal Solutions. He has more than 20 years of experience working in technology solutions across different industry verticals. His core competence involves con­ceiving strategies for a successful introduction of products and solutions in the engineering space. With a strong techno-commercial background, he has been implementing large digital transformation programs for various companies.

Massimo Pizzochero is a senior product manager with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, currently focussing on business intelligence and data analytics tools for the pharmaceutical sector. Massimo acts as a commercial front-end for SEA Vision's data analytics and automation tools and liaises between the sales and technical departments, providing strategic insights to country and regional sales teams. He works with manufacturers to uncover the hidden potential with-in their manufacturing process by highlighting inefficiencies and exploiting and maximizing opportunities. He is passionate about new technologies and project management and takes a keen interest in business matters.

Teresa Minero is the founder and CEO of LifeBee, a business consulting and digi­tal company dedicated to life sciences since 2004. She has more than 30 years of experience in managing international consulting and digital innovation projects for production, logistics, quality, regulatory and R&D and in managing startups and business divisions for international consulting groups. More than 25 years have been spent within life sciences. She is currently also the chair of the ISPE Italian affiliate, part of the ISPE European leadership team and part of the ISPE steering committee for Pharma 4.0 Global Special Interest Group. She has been a lecturer and chairman at many conferences and an author of many articles on digitalising life sciences and Pharma 4.0.

Peter Claes is the global knowledge manager of Datwyler. He holds a master’s degree in electromechanical engineering with a strong focus on automation. He has almost 20 years of experience in the field of engineering, 13 of them with Datwyler. Peter started his career as a project manager in the healthcare plant in Alken (BE) and over the years became a lead expert in his field. During this time, he participated in several global expansion and automation projects across Europe as well as in India and the US. Later he assumed the role of glob­al technology manager in which he was responsible for the global optimisation of the Datwyler manufacturing technologies. A global alignment of technologies and knowledge resulted in a reduction of engineering and manufacturing costs and a significant increase in plant flexibility and reliability. Recently he expanded his responsibility from the field of technology to global knowledge management in general.

Veronica holds a degree in computer science and has a strong background in automation, software development and resource managing. She is currently Product Manager defining the new generation of Antares Vision products. Before joining Antares Vision, she has covered a project manager role in different industries for more than 5 years.

Christian has long experience in the creation of transparency for automation infrastructure and architecture through As-Is workshop, incl. Analysis of current manufacturing processes and defining improvement actions for Automation as well as defining roadmaps. Over the past years, he established an enterprise architecture-based strategy for various international customers.